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Anne Frank, – The Prophetic Voice of a Teenage Diary

While in Amsterdam for those few days on my Van Gogh pilgrimage, I also visited the Anne Frank House. I had tried to book online before leaving to avoid the long queue, but it was booked a week in advance. However long queue or no long queue, I had already decided such a visit was a must.

So we arrived not long after opening at 9.00, and the queue was already long and slow moving. Now I'm not the most patient or contented queuer, but there are times when inconvenience, delay and anticipation are more significant than cramming every unforgiving minute with value for money tourism. We got talking to the couple behind us who had just flown over from Bitmingham, and who were also making a pilgrimage to this place of humane and humanising memory of a young girl whose honest goodness and innocent intelligence defied and triumphed over the inhuman bureaucracy of the genocidal imagination.

Then once we got in, after an hour's waiting, we made our slow way through the house, with the sound of the Kerk bells from nearby, the same bells she heard sounding when in hiding. And the slowness of those in front of us allowed time to see, to think, to pay attention, and so to imagine. One of the greatest moral challenges of our age is the safeguarding of the moral imagination, the developed capacity to anticipate, and have symathy with, and realise in thought and vision the cost and consequences of the intractably human lust for power, power over others, exerted for ends other than humane.

Anne Frank's Diary is one of the most astonishing achievements of World War II. Not just the transparent goodness and hopefulness of the entries; and more than the faithful recording of the experience of what it is like to be afraid, and hated by the powerful and ruthless; and more too than the exposing of political malignity observed and critiqued by a young woman wo was naive, but wise, and whose own future would be foreclosed by the lethal consistency of the racist mindset. The Diary is first hand evidence of human resilience, of spiritual awareness, of life loved as gift and mystery, and of that instinctive will to live and to live well, that occasionally illuminates the historical landscape, and gives us all hope and a much needed reminder of the glory of a human life whose music cannot be silenced.

Then near the end of the exhibit, time to look at the faces of those who hid in the hiding place, blqck and white photographs, and behind the face of Anne Frank, another queue, at the arrival station of Auschwitz, and then images of the Shoah and the Camp liberations. I was overwhelmed by then, having just stood in a slow moving queue to enter this house, and to pay respects to this story of one girl amongst 6 million of her people, and one girl amongst countless more people across continents, whose deaths are the fearful mathematics of state generated hatred linked to military ambition.

It is one of the sanitising statistics worth pondering, that all day every day, this house is open, and the queues are constant. And if everyone who comes to this place comes respectful and goes away subdued by a wondering sadness but a renewed commitment to the nourishing of humane values, then there is hope for us. The Hebrew Bible has the prophetic observation, "a child shall lead them". And so she did, and does.

21 August 2012
What happens when you put seashells on a sheet of paper.

(c) James M Gordon, 2012. Please ask if you want to use.

20 August 2012
Tapestry: Using Colour, Shape and Design as a Form of Exegesis

Working on the design for a new tapestry. I think Greek script in the New Testament is a beautiful form of writing. Several NT Greek words have profound resonance in Christian thought and experience. I am exploring ways of using colour and shape to give visual texture to those resonances, while at the same time wondering if colour and shape have any contribution to an exegesis of key words in theology and spirituality.

So I spent a while drafting a design, choosing colours and now just seeing what builds. But while stitching each letter, and therefore looking closely at these words, slowly giving shape, choosing colour, co-ordinating action of fingers and vision, I am wondering what the contemplative patience of such work contributes to a deeper appropriation of a text.

Whether such a visual medium contributes to the meaning of the text would require a much more technical discussion of hermeneutics, theological asthetics, liturgical symbolism and iconography. I've no such ambitions. Working tapestry is a form of meditative activity, which may at times draw the heart into contemplative attentiveness, the controlled freedom that comes from serious engagement with and receptiveness before the text. That said, there's something different about designing a tapestry around the form of a script, the shape of letters and words, and allowing that treatment to be shaped by theological presuppositions about the meaning of the words. What would be interesting is whether anything new emerges from a several week process of concentrated creative work focused on the form of the letters and words.

So we'll see what comes of it. For those interested I work in stranded cotton, blending the colours like paint on a pallette, and use a minimum of 22 points to the inch canvas.

19 August 2012
The Hermeneutic and Imperative of Love 2

The fruit of the Spirit is love

Joy is love’s consciousness

Peace is love’s confidence

Long–temperedness is love’s habit

Kindness is love’s activity

Goodness is love’s quality

Faithfulness is love’s quantity

Meekness is love’s tone

Temperance is love’s victory

The fruit of the Spirit is love.

The words were originally part of a sermon by G Campbell Morgan, preached at Westminster Chapel in the 1930's. Campbell Morgan was one of the most attractive classic evangelical biblical expositors. His sermons on 1 Corinthians 13 are spiritual reading that is both soul searching and psychologically astute. Not often is such literacy, rhetoric and spirituality fused into biblical reflection and made accessible through a demonstrably holy personality.

His commentary on Hosea is still one of the few that explores the full range of emotions in God that makes Hosea 11 amongst the most theologically subversive chapters for those who want a God predictably sovereign or indulgently loving – Holy Love is agony, but agony that persists in mercy.

The photo was taken on a walk beside a burn – (from Scots Gaelic for a watercourse that feeds larger rivers).

16 August 2012
Political Argy-Bargying versus the Determination to Make Music

While listening to the replay of yesterday's Today programme in which Minister for Policing, Nick Herbert, was accused by Evan Davis of "talking boring waffle" and evading direct questions, I noticed this, and my heart was glad.

In the torrent of words and cliches, interrupted by the sporadic gunfire of a not to be denied radio presenter, I multi-tasked – and listened to the political bickering while reading this story. The Radio 4 exchange was a cacophonoy of disagreement and non resolution; the story was music to my ears, and set me up for the day. The human voice, and the gift of language, the capacity to communicate and to say outwardly the truth that is in us, is one of the defining characteristics of being human, and humane. Used as an assertion of power, an evasion of truth, as rhetoric to construct illusion and unreality, as an instrument of conflict and a defining of the other as over and against, that same voice obscures that which is humane and enriches humanity. One of the necessary counterpoints is music, the skill and sensitivity, the creative urge and iron discipline, the givinbg of the self to the music so the music can be given. That's why my heart is glad – that a young man has found his own way of making music, against the odds, and with no deficit of excellence.

15 August 2012
Amsterdam, Van Gogh and the Things that Lie close to the Heart.

We have just spent a few days in Amsterdam doing some of the things I've wanted to do for years. So I spent a long time in the Van Gogh Museum, looking at some of his most famous work. It's a busy place. Even if you book online and miss the long entrance queue, there are still long queues, guided tours, people with audio guides enwrapt in the context and detail, and most folk jostling for a good view of the celebrity paintings. It would have been easy to become grumpy at the sheer struggle to look, see, gaze, admire, appreciate these masterpieces. And I often find those in front of me are bigger than I am which means a total eclipse of the painting if it's one of those really big tourists.And I haven't developed that brass knecked assertiveness that proceeds through an art gallery oblivious of courtesy, – an art gallery seems an inappropriate place to text out the survival of the fittest.

But standing amongst such riches of aching beauty, soul piercing eagerness to articulate deepest pain and deepest joy, and the anguish of someone who was unheard, misunderstood, and at times ridiculed by those who thought his art was merely madness, the least of my concerns was the bustling art lovers. Enough to be amongst those who have found there way here, to stand in front of this man's soul shaped and passionately coloured art, and to feel the depths of my own humanity, my own needs, and yes my own anxieties and joys. Some of these paintings expose our most cherished hopes, and our most self-diminishing fears, while also drawing us to see in the angst and exuberance of the artist, the two poles of human longing.

All that said, how can you look at the painting of his bedroom and not feel a deep love for the man who saw like that, and thought to paint a place so constrained and ordinary, with such extraordinary freedom and emotional investment. The story of Van Gogh and his brother Theo is one of remarkable courage, vision, tragic struggle against illness, faithful friendship between brothers, grabbing life with both hands yet unable to hold firmly to all that is life affirming and humanly fulfilling.

Some have tried to write about the spirituality of Van Gogh, or have used his paintings as devotional sounding boards. I don't doubt there are profound symbols and hints obvious and obscure in his work that encourages spiritual reflection. Indeed several of the overtly religious paintings do their own kind of aesthetic homiletic. But sometimes the message isn't in the painting; the painting reaches beyond articulated understanding and wounds us where comprehension is unnecessary, and recognition of who we are and why we are is sensed in that place deeper than reason and more permanent than passion.

I took a photo and removed the picture frame – better than some of the prints on sale, but the power is in the original.

13 August 2012
Isaianic Imagination – Dorothy Day and Peaceful Nay-Saying

Isaianic Haiku

Walk the ways of God –
the politics of shalom
make peace the new norm.
…………………………………………..

Swords into ploughshares –
weapons for food production,
not mass destruction.
………………………………

Double negative,
"We won't study war no more".
Future positive!

12 August 2012
The Hermeneutics and the Imperative of Love 1

We do not live for ourselves alone

and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact

that we begin to love ourselves properly,

and thus also love others.

What do I mean by loving ourselves properly?

I mean, first of all,

desiring to live,

accepting life as a very great gift

and a very great good,

not because of what it gives us,

but because of what it enables us to give to others.

Thomas Merton, The New Man, page xx.

Merton was one of the great affirmers of life. He was a living paradox, a gregarious solitary, a silent voice that wouldn't shut up, an ascetic who sought to live to the full, a monk who fell in love, and, from his Journals, a Christian who understood the inner conflicts, tensions, and anguishes of Romans 7, spilling over in his own experience into the liberty, joy and and fulfilments of life in the Spirit as in Romans 8.

Professor Larry Hurtado (New College Edinburgh) has several times lectured on the pervasive hermeneutic of love throughout the New Testament, and observed the lack of serious engagement with the theology and practice of love as a faith defining critierion in the life of each Christian community. Worship and liturgy, discipleship and doxology, sexual ethics and ecclesial politics, communal care and personal relationships, theological reflection and moral integrity, are each drawn into the orbit of the New Testament imperative of agape, the redemptive goodwill of God.

If we're honest, there's a clanging dissonance in the theory and the practice of agape as the primary Christian disposition, in much of the communal and personal practices of contemporary Christian spirituality. I find this both theologically intriguing and a rather glaring clue as to what the Church is for and its mandate to embody the good news of the Kingdom of God. So without knowing where this is going, for a few months towards Advent I'll post occasionally on the Hermeneutic and Imperative of Love. Not a chain of harangues nor a catena of moralising winges - both of these are in reality demoralising!

More a sowing of seeds of thought, a series of small perpsectival studies as experiments in what love might look like in practice, pieces of a jigsaw which may in the end have some pieces missing, but enough to make it worth looking for the lost pieces!

However. Not to get too philosophically carried away. The photos above and below depict a different perspectival study, entitled 'Smudgy Love'. The two favoured places are the cushion and the cardboard box.

10 August 2012
FF Bruce and the Epistle to the Hebrews – A Test Case for Evangelical Critical Scholarship Half a Century Ago.

Eerdmans have announced a new commentary on Hebrews. It's a new entry to the New International Commentary on the New Testament and it will replace the commentary of F F Bruce which anyone interested in evangelical New Testament scholarship reveres as a fine combination of historical exposition, textual exposition and theological exegesis. At a time when others were defensively negative about historical critical study of the New Testament, F F Bruce personified the confessional integrity of a man of thoughtful and committed Christian faith, unafraid of critical questions and warmly responsive to the spiritual message of the New Testament.

There are several reasons why Bruce was an ideal commentator on Hebrews for a commentary series launching into the market unsure of its credibility beyond evangelicalism. Bruce was a member of the Christian Brethren, a moderately conservative evangelical (how he tired of these carefully worded theological categories), and there are few traditions more theologically sympathetic to the rich symbolism and typology and the book of Hebrews. He was also a first rate historian, an erudite and meticulous scholar, and with an intellect weighted with both intelligence and integrity.

His commentary was commissioned in 1954, published in 1963 and revised in 1990, the year of his death. From the start Bruce on Hebrews was recognised as a lucid, historically thoughtful and theologically sensitive commentary which has enabled generations of readers to make sense of a book that is enigmatic, mysterious and for some downright perplexing in places. Melchizedek was as puzzling to readers in the 1960's as any complex theory of Derridean postmodern hermeneutics!

The replacement volume will be twice the length of Bruce, and will reflect current approaches to hermeneutics and literary social approaches to the text, majoring on chiasmus as the hermeneutic key. It will have to sit alongside strong competition from Peter O'Brien's Pillar commentary which is becoming the preferred treatment for evangelicals, not forgetting Paul Ellingworth's NICGT volume which is a massive treatment now showing its own age, and the even more comprehensive and richly informed Word commentary by W Lane. Then there is L T Johnson's fine commentary in the New Testament Library series, and Craig Koester's Anchor volume, and Fred Craddocks elegant exegesis in the New Interpreter's Bible.

So it's interesting that Bruce's volume will remain in print as a stand alone treatment of Hebrews. Much of his exposition is not significantly qualified by more recent scholarship and it remains a responsible and spiritually rewarding companion. Old fashioned it may be, but fashions of hermeneutic theory and practice are not the only criteria for exegesis that is faithful to the text because arising from within the faith tradition of the documents that are that same faith's foundation charters. Anyway, Bruce's commentary has no use by date, and in my view no expiry date.

I mention the replacement of a commentary for two reasons. First I own two copies of this commentary. It was one of the first commentaries I bought as a student minister and I read it through. my second copy was a gift from the library of the late Dr Eleanor Walker who died over a decade ago, before she could complete her studies for the Church of Scotland ministry.

Second, I have all the commentaries mentioned above, and I still go back to this veteran commentary by a veteran scholar who changed the opinion of the academy about the seriousness, creativity and integrity of evangelical critical scholarship. Bruce almost singlehandedly demonstrated the possibility that those three words could sit together without threatening oxymoron.

6 August 2012
Roses and Castles and the Politics of Life

Just spent a few days in Northumberland. The ruin of Dunstanburgh Castle is one of those impressive reminders of dangerous times, human power games and the labour and ingenuity that goes into territorial defence and territorial aggression. These were built to last, 700 years ago

Then there was the beauty and alternative worldview of Alnwick Gardens. The rose garden was past its best and had been battered by rain, but there's a defiance in flowers quite different from the defiance of stone and rock against sea, wind and human determination.

Whether in the shared harmony and profusion of colour and scent, or the single glory of fragile transience shaped into such modest loveliness below, the contrast of rose and rock, garden and castle, vulnerability and power, is one of the distinctions too easily overlooked in the politics of human life. I don't mean we don't need castles in a world of fractured and changing loyalties. But the question of why we need them, is one of the moral perplexities we may be losing the will and capacity to go on interrogating.

I didn't think many of those thoughts while on holiday – they began to assert themselves when looking at photos and deciding what to keep and discard. It could be argued quite persuasively that the beauty of gardens requires time, and peace, work and investment, and the hopefulness that others won't come and build a castle on the garden site. To prevent such purposes you need strong castles to deter and defend.

But if all of life is about looking over our shoulder, identifying the dangerous 'other', then maybe we need the reassuring space and viewpoint of a garden. Worryingly, both garden and castle need walls, and the wall is both a necessary part of human civilisation, and an ambiguous symbol that tells of our need to keep danger out and what we love safe.

Roses and castles. Hmmm.

5 August 2012