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Malala Yousufzai and a Prayer to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob

I have a number of Muslim friends, with whom I have laughed, argued, shared food; to whom I have listened, spoken and whom I deeply respect, a feeling that is mutual.

When earlier this year I conducted the funeral of a close friend who was a spiritual ecumenist, a man of profound and searching Christian conviction, who epitomised respectful listening, humble speaking and generous thinking, and who was a trusted member of the Inter Faith Group in Aberdeen, amongst the mourners were some of his Muslim friends, one of whom spoke at the funeral, to which the local Imam had sent a sincere apology that he could not attend due to other duties.

At University I majored in a course called Principles of Religion – forgive the immodesty, but I won the Class Prize. A major component was study of Islam, including sections of the Quran, a study of Judaism including Talmudic Tractates, and the same for Buddhism and Hinduism. I later won another prize for an essay entitled, "Compare the Islamic and Christian Conception of God". Amongst the greatest books I have read was the then recently published book by Kenneth Cragg, The Call of the Minaret, a book still acknowledged as an exemplary exploration of Islam by a critical and trusted Christian friend.

This isn't mere autobiography, nor, I hope a piece of online self-indulgence. My Muslim friends, my experience of Muslim Christian relations locally and in relationship, my own education and ongoing interest in the Abrahamic faiths, all combine in a complex reaction somewhere between deepwater sadness and turbulent moral outrage, laced with compassion and tears when I read the following:

"Taliban gunmen have shot and seriously wounded a
14-year-old schoolgirl who rose to fame for speaking out against the
militants, authorities have said.

Malala Yousufzai was shot in the head and neck when gunmen fired on her school bus in Pakistan's Swat valley."

I do not, and will not recognise nor concede that such an act has any connection whatsoever with Islamic doctrine and practice, with Muslim ethics, with a valid Islamic worldview, or even has a foothold on any mind and heart that dares speak the name of the God of Abraham. Taliban justification is a meaningless rhetoric of lethal hatred and a misconception of righteousness that is the toxic opposite of all that the great word "righteousness" means.

Oh God Of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,

have mercy on your daughter Malala Yousufzai;

restore her to health,

protect her from those who hate her;

frustrate the hate and violence

that targets children and silences voices of truth.

Eterrnal God, look on our history with compassion,

help us to look on our history with hope,

invade hearts that are hate filled,

occupy minds that are empty of life-giving ideas,

turn bullets to bread,

grenades to grain,

and the improvisation that creates devices of death,

convert to energy and creativity to build a different future.

We are running out of ideas, God of Wisdom:

Come in peace, Bringer of Life, Compassionate Lord,

Amen, and Amen.

10 October 2012
An Amateur Social Analysis and an Appeal to the Prophets Zechariah and Amos
Today's hot topics

X Factor

April Jones

Jimmy Savile

Personal pensions

George Osborne

Plus size clothes

Man United v New…

Weather forecast

Justin Lee Colli…

Cash for gold

OK. I get it that the hot topics people Search for, Tweet at, Twitter about and conduct Facebook dialogues and multi-logues around, are simply statistics of what people are interested in at any given moment. And that they change, and that number of hits isn't the only criterion for significance.

Still. It becomes an interesting way of reflecting what happens to be important to a whole lot of people at the same time. And if the menu, or pop chart, or hit list is a half way accurate reflection of social media activity, and as an index of people's interest, concern, curiosity, humour, it becomes interistinger still!

The possibility that the X Factor might be rigged – that is, a Reality show (which is demonstrably UNreal), might not meet the usual criteria for authenticity, spontaneity and sincerity. Many feel cheated at the thought.

A child is missing, suspected murdered, in one of those evil visitations that refuse to fit our usual categories of moral judgement and human responsibility. As a nation we feel judged by what happens to our children, and it is an important criterion of social criticism.

A deceased DJ allegedly abused young girls over a length of time, in a culture where it is also alleged it was if not condoned, neither was it exposed. And that culture spread well beyond one institution, the BBC, if further allegations are confirmed. Once again if even some of this happened, it is hard not to feel some responsibility.I was a teenager then, but part of a culture where such things could happen. Now truth has to be spoken, hurt acknowledged, and where possible actions brought to the light of justice

Then there's the concern about personal pensions, the Chancellor's plans to save £10 billion on the welfare bill, after which it gets sillier – oversize clothes, a football match in which one player's elbow connected with another player's head, the weather forecast, an English comedian and how much cash for gold.

I have no idea how to break all that down into a social analysis that would hold water as a critique of how we live our lives today. I leave that to the social analysts. But two of the top three are about vulnerable children and young people being unsafe in our midst. I know it's not a new thing, and anyway the allegations about Jimmy Saville span 40 years or more. Zechariah 8.5 looks forward to the blessing of God when "the streets of the city will be full of the noise of children playing in the street." I'm up for that! I'd pray for that, hope for that, and not give up such hoping. But like Michaelangelo's Zechariah I guess there is much that threatens to overwhelm that hope.

The top Hot Topic is about a TV show that by any measurements beyond money, fascination with celebrity, or lust for fame, contributes little to the end product of a good society where human life flourishes. A society where each person is cherished, has dignity, is invested with worth and offered both the freedom to be and the support of others in becoming mature exponents of that elusive essential we call humanity. Which has the same root as humility – which exists in a different universe from the X Factor.

As for the other exciting topics, well yes, pensions and Chancellors, cash for gold, they are about money. And while the love of money is the root of all evil, that evil is magnified when the unequal world we inhabit draws down ancient warnings from Amos that vibrate down the centuries with the same message of moral peril for societies where luxury and penury co-exist, and when power talks of fairness rather than justice, compassion and, that ancient word of the Hebrew Bible, righteousness. Which we can take to mean when things are right in the sight of God, both the things we do and the things that are.
8 October 2012
Eucharist, Champagne and Resurrection!

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)

7 October 2012
Edith Stein, Abraham Heschel, Philosophy, and God.

While reading Abraham Heschel and doing some research on the reception of his thought today I came across a forthcoming book that compares Heschel's doctrine of divine pathos with Edith Stein's philosophy of empathy. Edith Stein was brought up in a Jewish family and converted to Catholicism after a period of overt intellectual atheism. One of her theological and philosophical gifts was a capacity to refuse the temptation of intellectual polarity. The important truths of existence are seldom either or, but more often both and. She was a spiritual ecumenist, and never lost her gratitude for, her respect for, or her supportive interest in, the Jewish people and the Faith out of which Christianity was born. She was a student of Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and so gifted as a philosopher she was Husserl's assistant for a couple of years. The relationship between philosophy and theology was one where she was called to be a bridge between two intellectual continents, a conduit through whom philosophical theology and theological metaphysics passed creating in her a spirituality and devotional depth that remains a rich reservoir of faith.

Following her conversion she taught for a while, before becoming a Carmelite nun in 1932, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She died in Auschwitz in 1942, ironically as a Catholic nun comforting distressed Jewish children. In 1998 she was canonised by her Church.

I'm currently reading a selection of her writings, and am left wondering why it has taken so long to get to someone whose grasp of the eternally significant, and of the connection between contemplatiuve prayer and redemptive activity in the world was well ahead of its time. At the time of her canonisation Pope John Paul II described her:

"Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross says to us all: Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love that lacks truth. One without the other becomes a destructive lie….May her witness constantly strengthen the bridge of mutual understanding between Jews and Christians."

Part of the excitement of the rich and varied Christian tradition, is that it is really a river system of tributaries flowing together into the mighty river which reaches the ocean in a rich confluence from diverse sources, which sprung in hills and mountains, merging and separating then coming together in a flowing triumph of life-giving water. That's why to discover new thinkers and new thought, is no threat to the integrity of my tributary, but is a contribution to the onward flow of wisdom, understanding, prayer and worship of the God who is beyond our circumscribing habits of thought, and whose wine of glory and gladness can't be contained in the old wineskins of our intellectual and spiritual comfort zones.

6 October 2012
All Things Bright and Beautiful

Captions Please in the Comments – and I'll add them to either the ducks or the Smudge photos. By the way, we don't like the curtains so once Smudge progresses through adolescence we'll replace them!

5 October 2012
Dandelion Haiku

Precise profusion

of seed-bearing parachutes:

dandelion clocks!

30 September 2012
The Lord’s Prayer and a Vacuum Without Compassion

"There is a pressing urgency to the work of justice and compassion. As long as there is a shred of hatred in a human heart, as long as there is a vacuum without compassion anywhere in the world, there is an emergency."

Heschel writes with poetic exaggeration, sees the world with uncompromising eyes, is impatient with political realism, thinks with determined trustfulness in the human capacity, helped by God, to change the world. But that doesn't make him wrong, or justify dismissing his words as rhetoric without practice. Few have seen with such piercing precision, as Heschel saw, the emergency situation of a world where compassion was discounted to shore up an unjust status quo, and where justice was not an option at our convenience but an urgent moral imperative.

I guess I'm troubled by the way urgency and emergency seem to be monopolised by the economic crises of recent years. No one needs to underestimate the scale of consequence and cost when an entire economic meta-narrative suffers near fatal internal critique and collapse.

But there are other recessions. Already pressure is building for the UK to reduce its foreign aid budget. That suggests a humanitarian recession, which cuts into our sense of global responsibility for those whose need is of a different order. When Heschel speaks of justice and compassion he speaks as an echo of Micah, Amos and Isaiah. Selling the poor, grinding the needy in the dust, exploiting the vulnerable, protecting the interests of the powerful and rich – and by contrast rivers rolling with righteousness, communities acting justly and loving mercy, – these were the two poles of prophetic protest and visionary hopefulness that glinted like lightning on the horizons of the Prophets. And the same concerns illumine with uncomfortable critique of our own time, the words of Jesus at Nazareth and his own stated purpose in coming as Messiah, as both message and messenger from God to the poor, those incarcerated by economic systems locked from the outside.

Whatever else the situation in Syria is, it is a humanitarian emergency given urgency by hatred. And non intervention is itself a political act open to the critique of justice, mercy and righteousness, three further recessional casualties in a world of economic stringency, moral insolvency and political expediency.

And what can we do? The Lord's Prayer grows out of the rich loam of Jewish faith and hope, and on Judaeo-Christian lips is a protest against the status quo, and a promised contradiction and reversal of those "principalities and powers" content with injustice as a static status quo. The Kingdom of God subverts stasis, confronts culpable complacency, levers against the stuckness of despair, resists self-serving inaction, opposes with an astringent holiness the worship of markets, money and the entire pantheon of economic idols.

So we can pray. And not muttered petitions vague in their content, or vapid in their emotional engagement, or as occasional as our personal convenience and preoccupied minds permit. To pray the Lord's Prayer is to yearn for a different kingdom, a world transformed by the will of the Father of mercies. It is to call in question the way things are, to recognise the emergency of hatred and the vacuum of compassion and to cry to heaven – to make our passion and compassion for God's children the world over, a gift on the altar of God. Christian prayer at times takes the form of passionate protest, persistent hopefulness and patient, resilient attentiveness to injustice. Such faithful prayer is one small part of what it means to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.

28 September 2012
The Cows’ Harvest Thanksgiving

Autumn Fields

Sunshine on harvest:

throughout winter, cows
enjoy

straw coloured swiss
rolls.

27 September 2012
The Prayer of Grateful Longing

Sometimes it just works.

I took this photo in Amsterdam, the same day I saw Van Gogh's Butterflies and Poppies.

Both capture the fragility and complexity of beauty, and life.

Theological reflection seems called for but perhaps contemplation, enjoyment and wonder are themselves forms of theologically productive attention, inviting thought to become prayer of grateful longing.

20 September 2012
When Beauty Invades our Complacncy

For Von Balthasar, "Beauty is love made visible".

Calvin spoke of the created order as "The theatre of God's glory."

Aquinas, "Art is the promise of happiness, and the splendour of truth."

This summer, sometimes unintentionally, or as experiments that surprisingly worked, I have taken photos which have their own persuasiveness in the argument about whether there is a natural theology, a theology of nature in which the beauty and goodness and truth of God is glimpsed. Appreciation and interpretation of images that move us will always be inescapably subjective. Not all will see or agree with or even understand what it is that moves, and attracts, and opens us up to that which is beyond mere conceptualisation but which invades our complacency with an unexpected excitement, with moments of recognition that can change the way we see the world, if we pay attention to them. For in them is the promise of happiness and the splendour of the truth that lies at the heart of all that is.

17 September 2012