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Haiku on a Favourite Picture

Beauty in repose,

eyes gazing wonderingly

at futures unknown.

This is one of my favourite images of the Virgin Mary. An early European sketch by Rogier Van der Weyden. Alongside much more developed images this near neutral sketch exudes mystery, beauty, and an all but tangible intimation of the sacred.

I don't mean in any soft, unreflective devotional reverie, those responses that are best summed up as "nice". Art like this communicates the inner meanings of faith through those hints and clues of tone and technique, the power of form and capacity to set off those inner resonances which are prompts to recognition; that what we are looking at is more than we see, and signifies deeper than we can often feel, or think. 

Mary's "Yes" at the Annunciation is one of the pivotal points in salvation history. Maybe so. But what makes it so, is it is also one of those moments when a human heart transcended the limits of human possibility and said "Yes" to an unknown future, not out of mere resignation, but from a willed act of costly obedience.

The art that surrounds the Annunciation is an embarrassment of masterpieces; but this small sketch has its place amongst the most theologically focused, because the face, understood in human encounter, is the mirror of the embodied self, the reflection of our inner being, the outward expression to the world of our most personal self.

The beauty of repose is therefore a profoundly reassuring image of God's modus operandum in the loving of the world.

Next June this book is being published. I don't usually pre-order 9 months in advance. Few books that interest me sell out within the first few weeks, or years.

But here's an interesting thing. In 1977 I bought Howard Marshall's commentary on Luke, the first volume in the series New International Commentary on the Greek New Testament (NICGNT). One of the ones I most want to get my hands on is still not written: Richard Bauckham on the Gospel of John being one of them. That book has been scheduled for 35 years, and I would really, really, like to read it before I die!

There are, for the commentary lover, desiderata that we dream about. I still remember going into the tiny St Paul's Bookshop when it was at the top of Buchanan Street in the early 1970's. It was staffed by several warmly welcoming and knowledgeable Catholic nuns, who knew a thing or two about reading the Bible seriously. 

Now I worked for a couple of years in a brickwork in Carluke, Lanarkshire, while earning the money to get to University. I was a brick setter – which means I placed the bricks in the kilns, stacked neatly in rows of five with a finger breadth between them and built in pillars 10 high, before building a wall across them to the ceiling. You lifted 28 a minute, and each weighed around 4 kilos (actually just over 7lbs). Forget any idea of doing weights – this was a gym you got paid for working in, and it was warm too – so you only worked 30 minutes on, and 20 m inutes off.

Back to the bookshop. I took a book off the bookshelf that was just about exactly the palm spread of an uncooked brick! Remember I know this – Every half hour in the kiln I lifted and stacked hundreds of them. It was of course a fraction of the weight of a clay brick, but its dimensions were uncannily similar. And so, for £6, I bought volume one of Raymond Brown's commentary on John's Gospel. In 1972, £6 would buy you 19 gallons of petrol – I'll leave you to do the maths of 86 litres times the current cost of petrol.

I came back a month or two later for volume 2. And those two volumes, published by Geoffrey Chapman before Doubleday, and now Yale took over the series, remain lifetime companions in the study of John. I later bought Brown's volume on the Johannine Epistles. It's just as thick, magisterial and impressive, but by then I had lived with Brown on John's Gospel long enough to appreciate the spiritual investment of buying the right commentary, at the right time.

So this post is by way of a plea, a prayer even. Richard Bauckham on John, Tom Wright on Philippians, Walter Brueggemann on Psalms – These three things Dear Lord I pray!

The Mayfield Brockworks closed at the end of 2011. Look here and  you can see a slide show of the whole process and the remains of the Works, including the interior of the kilns. I worked there from 1970 to 72, night shift, from 7.00 pm to 7.30 am Monday to Thursday, and Friday 1.00pm to 5.00pm, and Saturday 7am – 12 noon!

As well as the hermeneutic of love, on which I have previously written once or twice, I am equally fascinated by the imperative of peace. I tend to think of the term "imperative" as strong and forceful, energetically purposeful, persistently assertive, likely to override other legitimate and alternative viewpoints. Used with certain other words it can be less than peaceful – for example to pursue a "territorial imperative", or legislate an "economic imperative", or promote a "political imperative", even, and perhaps especially those actions deemed to be imperative in the interests of that many headed originator of monsters, "security".

But I'm not prepared to yield a word that is strong and forceful, energetically purposeful and persistently assertive. And while it would be nonsense to override other alternative viewpoints in the name of peace, that doesn't mean I'm prepared to surrender the moral imperative of peace-building, peace-making, peace-seeking, peace-arguing, even if it means costly peace-paying and patient peace- praying.

All of this comes out of spending time on the new tapestry on the word Shalom. My guide and mentor on things eirenic and pacific is Walter Brueggemann. Few biblical scholars have such a prohpetic gift of debunking, demythologising, deconstructing and de-clawing the ferocity of language used to justify economic, military and religious aggression. His wee book Living Toward a Vision is now in its third reading on my desk. Much of his later writing is in the same hopefully defiant tone of Kingdom critique of the powers that be.

Alongside that early manifesto on Shalom, is his commentary on the Psalms a decade later with its hallmark analysis of faith, God and disrupted human experience encountering disruptive grace – orientation, disorientation, re-orientation. And that re-orientation after fear, fire, anxiety, tragedy, depression, conflict and many another sideswipe from life, is another, and life renewing form of peace, shalom.

Having spent some time forming and shaping words for love, wisdom and grace, it seems a providential but predictable step to bringing those three within a more practical and inclusive worldview – shalom as that which we seek for ourselves by seeking it for others; peace as both gift and goal; the common good a life aspiration because it is an essential for human life if we and our planet are to flourish; indefatigable goodwill, which means the persistent presentation of kindness, embodied expression of mercy, a continuing in the community of the love of God in Christ which is rooted in the Eternal Community of Love which is the Triune God.

The God of hope, the God of peace,

the God of grace, the God of wisdom,

whom we know as the God who is love,

fill us with all hope in believing,that peace is possible

because made possible in Christ,

and that peace-making is an imperative for ministers of reconciliation,

and that the Prince of Peace has defeated the Prince of the Power of the Air,

and that the Lamb in the midst of the throne

subverts all other pretenders who clamber on to thrones of their own making,

and God's unmaking.  

In the name of the Prince of Peace.

The Beauty of Dreich

Dreich Scottish
mornings:

Drizzled
moistures coalesce,

Liquid crystal light.

"Dreich" – dull, wet, cold, lacking colour and vitality, an undertow of melancholy.

But in the right place, at the right time, unexpected beauty is glimpsed, and a jewel glints in the one ray of sunshine.

I've spent the last couple of months working on a tapestry in which three Greek words – sophia, agape and charis – are woven into a pattern of vivid contrasting colours. In recent years I've been developing a form of contemplative action while doing tapestry. I mainly work in stranded cotton and with a canvas gage of 22 to 28 per inch. 

To spend hours stitching a word like Agape and blending colours of red and purple around it is very different from tracing the use of agape in the New Testament, and exploring the semantic domain and extra canonical occurences which give contextual texture. That too is a contemplative and prayerful study – "bury your head in a lexicon and raise it in the presence of God" – as the great Gospels scholar B H Streeter once urged his students.

But to study a word by forming it in stitches has its own value as contemplative activity, prayerful action, meditative reflection on the inner meaning and outer beauty of a word. Image and colour, shape and form, the creative intention of the artist, bring a different kind of attentiveness no less imaginative, disciplined and valid as an attentive listening and gazing into the reality to which the word points – Agape, Love.

The vivid and dark tone, the contrast and complement of colour, with shades merging or clashing, and shapes emerging and forming rather than fixed and formal, creates a visual exegesis of what this word means, at least to the artist. Stitching a tapestry involves combining thousands of small repetitive acts of precise purpose, each completed with careful attention to what surrounds it, yet each stitch an essential word composed into the evolving story. Every stitch demands the practised co-ordination of hand and eye, the quiet and patient discipline that enables a needlepoint to find the right square, coming back through unsighted, to complete the stitch, and with a choice of 46,080 on a 10 by 8, 24 per inch canvas.

I found myself the other morning doing 20 minutes stitching, while listening to Classic FM, Mozart's Clarinet Concerto slow movement, with a mug of half drunk tea, and paying particular attention to the choice of colours for the surrounding border. Was it the music that took my mind to the First Letter of John, and agape as the test of Christian life, because the agape of God is as James Denney said, "the last reality of the universe"? Maybe so – I have a friend who insists that Mozart composed the music scores for heaven, and I'm not inclined to disagree.

Or was it the colours themselves – blue for wisdom, red for love, green for grace – and golden yellows as the backgound, colours and ideas which invite the kind of reverie in which memorised text, significant experiences, and vivid visuals coalesce in the hermeneutics of love and longing which I for one, dare to call prayer?

The Typepad Help Team are working on the problem  of the sidebar feature where I usually list the Current Reading items. I'm being patient with them, because they are trying to fix a glitch and it is proving to be an obstinate glitch, and because they are courteous, quick to respond and work hard!

So just to keep the rolling catalogue up to date, here's some of the books I've recently read or am currently reading:

When I was a Child I Read Books, by Marilynne Robinson. This has been reviewed with enthusiasm elsewhere. My enthusiasm is for some of the essays, but some of them seem less urgent and relevant. But with Robinson that means the least appealing are very good, the good ones are brilliant, and two in particular are stand out pieces of Christian theological writing. Austerity and Ideology is as sharp a critique of penalising the poor by political fiat as you will read; and Wondrous Love is an equally astringent critique of the poor stewardship of Christians entrusted with a Gospel of love but preferring a Gospel much more self-centred.

The Mangan Inheritance, Brian Moore, is a novel I have re-read twenty years after the first read. I didn't enjoy it as much second time round. A washed up American returning to Ireland to try to trace the connection between himself and Mangan a famous and notoriously debauched poet. It may be the changed world of 20 years on, maybe I've become more morally sensitised, but the plot left me feeling the way I do when I watch a TV programme and find myself viewing something unpleasant I wish I'd been warned about beforehand.

Why Go To Church by Timothy Radcliffe is a very good book. I read it over a few weeks, a bit at a time. Sensible, spiritually alert, learned without showing off, pastorally realistic, he is one of the best writers of popular theology around – and by the way popular doesn'r mean dumbed down. After scathing preachers who think they are the most important part of the sermon, this:"Our words should gather in and heal. They belong to our discovery of the mystery of God's will to unite all things in heaven and on earth in Christ. Preaching makes peace." Oh yes!

Edith Stein. The Essential Writings, Ed. John Sullivan. This is in the series Modern Spiritual Masters – the irony of that gender exclusive name for the series is the more obvious, but I suppose Modern Spiritual Mistresses wouldn't be much of an improvement. Maybe Modern Spiritual Thinkers? Anyhow. I've only recently paid attention to the writing of Edith Stein (because of a connection with A J Heschel in a recently published book). Someone who rubbed shoulders with leading Catholic and Jewish intellectuals became herself a philosophical theologian of a contemplative disposition whose practical Christian service earthed deepest thought in daily realities. I like her.

Frederick Dale Bruner, The Gospel of John. This is the most remarkable commentary! I knew it w3ould be for I've used his two volume Matthew commentary for years. This would justify a year in the company of John's Gospel, stimulated by a commentary that is neither technical nor popular, which engages in historico- critical exegesis but pays attention to the reception of the Gospel and the history of interpretation. And Bruner loves this text – Augustine, Aquinas, Chrysostom, Luther, Calvin, Bengel, Matthew Henry and other classics are brought into conversation with the dozen or so best commentaries of the last hundred years. I don't use the word often, indeed I don't like the way it overstates everything – but in this case I use it advisedly – Bruner's work is awesome!

This is one of the loveliest stories I've read for a long time:

When one of our brethren, Osmund Lewry, was dying, the whole community squeezed into his small room, on cupboards and under the desk, to celebrate the Easter Eucharist. After Communion, we sang the Regina Caeli, and then I went to get champagne from the fridge, so that we could drink to the Resurrection. I commented on how beautifully the the brethren had sung and Osmund replied that really, if his timing had been better, he would have died while it was being sung, but he had to hang on for the champagne!

Tomorrow the Son of Man will walk in the garden

Through drifts of apple blossom.

(Why Go to Church, Timothy Radcliffe, page 126)