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Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution – Martin Luther King’s dream.

Today is an historic day. The inauguration of Barack Obama will mark another step towards the fulfilment of the most famously articulated dream of the 20th Century. On the obvious public, contemporary, global media level, the day belongs to Barack Obama – but in terms of history, human significance, Christian witness and political theology, the day belongs to the Baptist pastor whose dream, nearly fifty years ago, inspired others to dream.

So on this inauguration day, instead of quoting from Obama's autobiography, quoted below are important words with which he is required to engage if he is to be anywhere near true to the vision of Martin Luther King. The extract comes late on from a remarkable sermon in which MLK tackled politically embedded racism, world poverty and the tragic stupidity of the Vietnam war. I've inserted italics at a sentence which is not only quintessential MLK – it states the grounds of a Christian political ethic as a stance of Christian witness. The sermon is called

Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

This is why I felt the need of raising my voice against that war
and working wherever I can to arouse the conscience of our nation
on it. I remember so well when I first took a stand against the
war in Vietnam. The critics took me on and they had their say in
the most negative and sometimes most vicious way.

One day a newsman came to me and said, "Dr. King, don’t
you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war
and move more in line with the administration’s policy? As
I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and
people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t
you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?"
I looked at him and I had to say, "Sir, I’m sorry you
don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine
what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference. I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup
Poll of the majority opinion." Ultimately a genuine leader
is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient?
And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic?
Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question,
is it right?

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither
safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience
tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for
all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience
and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "We ain’t
goin’ study war no more." This is the challenge facing
modern man.

***<<<>>>***

In a world where hope comes hard, expectations of this Presidency are understandbly but unreasonably high. But lovers of peace and makers of peace, dreamers of hope and makers of hope, those who hunger and thirst for that righteousness of acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with God, will today pray God that the newly inaugurated President will live up to his own rootedness in those ideals and values determined to use rather than abuse power.

20 January 2009
Dante on the Sin of Usury and the Credit Crunch .

A week ago at the Fabian Society in London Peter Mandelson warned that the recovery from recession would cause a major and painful consolidation of financial services and a reduction of the economy's dependence on such "financial services". Lord Mandelson said in the future there would be "less financial engineering and more real engineering in our economy". Indeed there would be an absolute necessity for the British economy to recover a significantly greater base in manufacturing, in the making of real things, in the production of that which can be traded. Sure money makes money, but it will become critically important to recover a manufacturing base, those people, and more people, who make the products that make the money to make money – I think is the argument.

Speaking a few weeks ago with a retired and previously very senior manager of one of Scotlands now troubled Banks, he was lamenting (that's the right word) the abandoning of traditional banking values and practices in pursuit of financial services and money marketing. Once Banks became more interested in selling credit at higher rates than they borrowed it, they began to lose interest in the depositing and saving customer and more interested in the borrower who is to be persuaded to buy increasingly unrealistic levels of credit. We all experienced it – you are there to do your own business and the teller can't get quickly enough to asking about your mortgage, credit needs – you are no longer a bank customer whose money is to be secured but a money-on-credit consumer from whom the Bank wants to make more money. The result is a global economy dependent less on producing and manufacturing goods, as one in which money moves around, circulates, in arteries increasingly furred up with bad cholesterol / debt.

And so to Dante. One of the serious and enlightening games the mind plays when reading a text that is pre-modern, culturally removed by centuries and geography, translated therefore out of a long gone worldview into the way we view the world, is finding the points of connection that make its insights universal. So I was intrigued to find the following passage dealing with the sin of usury. That's right – the sin of earning money solely by lending it, greedily selling its purchasing function to someone else for a price higher than its face value in hours worked, skills used and products manufactured.

Dante's theological aim is remarkably accurate. Human art, and that represents all productive work by artisans and trade guilds, reflects the Creator God. The good God creates the natural world, and since human beings are made in the image of God, human art expresses and imitates God's creativity. Usury, the lending of money for interest, offends against nature (God's child), and against human art (God's grandchild). It is this view of human work, our innate capacity for creation and stewardship of nature's resources, that Dante sees as the purposive human activity God intends. Amassing wealth by exacting interest is a parasitic activity that produces nothing but money – which will eventually lose its mundane value, and never had any heavenly value. Usury is ultimately an offence against the Creator, the sin of skiving while others do the work and earn the very wealth that is being amassed by credit sellers. Here's Dante's take on the credit crunch – its origins and why it happened.

……..

Go back a little to that point, I said,

Where you told me that usury offends

Divine goodness; unravel now that knot.

   “Philosophy, for one who understands,

points out, and not in just one place”, he said,

“how nature follows – as she takes her course –

   the Divine Intellect and Divine Art;

and if you read your Physics carefully,

not many pages from the start, you’ll see

   that when it can, your art would follow nature,

just as a pupil imitates his master;

so that your art is almost God’s grandchild.

   From these two, art and nature, it is fitting,

if you recall how Genesis begins,

for men to make their way, to gain their living;

   and since the usurer prefers another

pathway, he scorns both nature in itself

and art, her follower; his hope is elsewhere.”

(Canto XI, lines 94-111)

.

19 January 2009
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria von Wedemeyer: “Our marriage shall be a yes to God’s earth”.

Yesterday was January 17. On that day in 1943, while Europe was darkened by war and the German people implicated by nationhood in a regime and ideology of immense evil and ultimate despair, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became engaged to Maria van Wedemeyer. Three months later Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned.

The importance of Bonhoeffer and Maria's engagement lies in what it signifies. The love of two people who make public their decision to be joined in marriage makes engagement a symbolic statement of intent. But in its timing, and the fact that it was never broken while Bonhoeffer was alive, it signified something else to the wider world. Like Jeremiah buying a field prior to his land being invaded, Bonhoeffer and Maria's engagement is a sign of hope and hopefulness, of trust and affirmation of the beauty, value and purpose of human life and love. Against the nightmare darkness of their time, engagement was a confession of faith. Bonhoeffer says all this much better himself.

When I also think about the situation of the world, the complete darkness over our personal fate and my present imprisonment, then I believe that our union can only be a sign of God's grace and kindness, which calls us to faith…And I do not mean the faith which flees the world but the one that endures the world and which loves and remains true to the world in spite of all the suffering which it conatins for us. Our marriage shall be a yes to God's earth; it shall strengthen our courage to act and accomplish something on the earth. I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven. (Testament to Freedom, 488, italics mine).

What remarkable human beings Bonhoeffer and Maria were; and that humanity is what gives credibility to their witness, making Bonhoeffer an even more remarkable Christian. And the words in italics – they could be incorporated into a contemporary version of Christian marriage promises!

18 January 2009
The Divine Comedy, Everyman’s Library, and taking our lives seriously.

In The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose celebrates the magnificent achievement of J M Dent's Everyman's Library, 'the largest, most handsome, and most coherently edited series of cheap classics'.

Over the years I've read a number of literary classics in the Everyman's Library Editions, and now own a number of them in their contemporary dress. They're still remarkably cheap given the quality of the production. I don't collect them, but now and again when I want to appreciate the beauty of a book as well as the quality of its contents, I indulge. How is this for a publisher's description of their product:

Everyman's Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern
prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically
designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper
and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color
case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and
European-style half-round spines.

The original series reflected the choices and prejudices of its time – 1906 Edwardian England, in which Empire, Western Europe and maleness acted as cultural blinkers – though not as much as some have claimed. The new series begun in the mid 1990's is much more inclusive, and though it still gives prominence to items in "the Western Canon", there is now due recognition of other important voices. It's this modern Everyman's which I enjoy reading, holding, looking at. There are several key poets, several of the great novels, and an assortment of miscellaneous personal preferences I'd like to accommodate in the already tightly budgetted space on my bookshelves. (Now the Everyman's Pocket Poets – they are already claiming space on the narrow shelves and wee corners where others don't fit).

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever". More prosaically, a number of life coaches and social psychologists are suggesting one way to beat the credit crunch, defy economic despair, dispel the can't-afford-it gloom, is to go on allowing ourselves the occasional luxury enjoyment, the regular encounter with beauty, a deliberate evasion of barcode valuation. For some it's chocolate, or concert tickets, flowers, colourful clothes – actually I like all these options as well – but a selection of them kinda books what are described above? Would that be credit crunch defiance – or denial? Well no – it would be commendable cultural responsibility, responsibly developed literary taste, judicious aesthetic choices made in a crass consumerist market – aye right.

Anyway, I've quietly been making my way through Dante's The Divine Comedy, which I've never read all the way through. The photo (a reminder of sunshine on a dreich Scottish January weekend) is of Dante's statue which we visited a couple of years ago when in Verona – and I remember wondering why I'd never tackled a full reading of one of Europe's literary masterpieces. So I've started. 100 Cantos – finished by Easter? There are now several industries devoted to things to do before you die – places to visit, foods to eat, people to meet, ambitions for which to reach – haven't come across one yet about books to read before you die. Nevertheless.

Hazlitt's comment on Dante's achievement explains why Dante's is a voice to be attended to at some time in life:

" He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world…He is power, passion and self-will personified".

Each day for around twenty minutes I'm attending to a voice which to me is strange, often compelling, at times perplexing, but which requires sufficient honesty and courage to have mind and heart, motive and desire, act and being, sifted by verse which is surgical in psychological exposure, but ultimately therapeutic in spiritual vision and intent. At times I've suspected Dante has been reading that diary of our inner life we all keep, which records in encrypted code those truths about us that no one else is allowed to know – but God knows, and in a moral universe, eternal consequence follows.

Robert Browning once described Dante in two lines:

Dante, who loved well because he hated,

Hated wickedness that hinders loving.

The paradox of that line, hating "wickedness that hinders loving", at least recognises the ambiguity of shame and dignity, of guilt and glory that comprises, and compromises, human existence at its worst and best.

17 January 2009
Intentional Bible reading and transformative practice

Ian asked in a comment for an unpacking of an admittedly dense sentence in the previous post (in mitigation, it was written early morning though;) )

"Intentional
Bible reading as spiritual discipline leading to transformative
practice, while a core emphasis in Baptist spirituality, is certainly
not a Baptist or Evangelical monopoly game."

So I'll try to expand and explain. Those of us embedded in Scottish Baptist life recognise that we often make a strong claim to being a Bible believing people. Our devotion to Scripture is expressed in such characteristic ways as Bible study, preaching that is biblically rooted in exposition of the text, and testing of church practice, personal ethics and doctrinal conviction against the benchmark of Christ as revealed in Scripture. The place of such Christ-centred biblical commitment is historically and culturally pervasive in our spirituality and is all but unquestioned amongst Scottish Baptists. But we are prone to exaggerate such biblical devotion as an Evangelical or Baptist distinctive, at times being dismissive of the biblical rootedness of other traditions which may not claim to be either Baptist or Evangelical. Yet actual reading of Scripture, and practice of the Gospel in faithfulness to Christ, are as evident in other traditions as our own – so that at times we can sound painfully self-righteous. So we don't have a monopoly on such biblically oriented spirituality.

I suspect the more compacted clause is the first one though, and especially the phrase "transformative practice". I was thinking of how deliberate and regular consideration of Scripture, alone or even better in fellowship with others, leads to transformation. By prayer, study, reflection and application to life, the word again becomes flesh, embodied and active in Christ following action. The transformative power of Scripture is therefore pervasive and invasive, reaching both within us and beyond us, re-shaping Christian community to the form of Christ, and flowing outward in witness and service.

For example to encounter the words, "He has shown you human beings what is good, and what does the Lord require of you, but to act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God", is to know ourselves addressed by God, called to change; it is to hear love's ultimatum, to recognise a sovereign invitation to grow through an inner reconfiguring of priorities, attitudes and responsiveness, that instigates in us and around us, new pattterns of behaviour. So not only the change in me, but as I am summoned by God's requirement to change and behave differently, I become an agent of mercy, an enthusiast for just acting, one who walks humbly with the God whose transformative Word disrupts and reconfigures my worldview. That's what I meant by "Intentional
Bible reading as spiritual discipline leading to transformative
practice".

As a matter of fact it would be an interesting experience for a Christian community to let that one Micah verse be the focus of attention, and through a process of communal discernment and intentional reading, ask the question;

so what for us as a people does it now mean,
for us, at this time and in this place,
to act justly, and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with God?

Ask such a question seriously, work towards its answer with honesty and imagination, and sooner or later the Spirit of Christ translates intentional reading into transformative practice.

16 January 2009
Baptist catholicity and Lectionary Bible readings

I'm a liturgically alert Baptist, and try to be spiritually and temperamentally open and receptive in my Christian sympathies. Baptist catholicity as rootedness in the unity and diversity that is the Body of Christ as it is manifested in time and space, is for me a Gospel imperative; far from being disloyal to Baptist distinctives, catholicity of heart enables our own distinctive witness to be borne amongst other Christians, in faithful humility, and allows my own tradition to be enriched in turn by the faithful witness of other Christians from other traditions.

The Christian Year therefore provides an important framework within which I understand my own place in the wider Christian story. The Christian year and its liturgical underpinning in the Lectionary is the common property of the entire Christian church, it is the narrative framework of our faith woven daily into the fabric of our time. John Colwell, who teaches Christian Doctrine at Spurgeon's College and who is himself a Baptist with strong liturgical sympathies and a temperament deeply catholic in its theological reach towards other traditions, recently wrote a significant and innovative summary of Christian doctrine based on the Church Year. John's book is titled The Rhythm of Doctrine – and in it the Christian story is framed within the Christian year from Advent to Ascension. John's theological writing is one of the really significant theological contributions currently being made by British Baptists. This book may well be written up into a larger project of Christian Doctrine explored within a liturgical framework – and I for one would like him to get on with it!

The Revised Common Lectionary has for quite a long time been the basis of my personal weekly Bible meditation. An important dimension of my own reading and reflection of this Lectionary is the remarkable fact that millions of other Christians are thinking about, reading, in different ways engaging with, the same passages from the Bible. As a Baptist Christian I've never felt the need to deny or diminish the traditions of others who in their way,in their place and in their time are seeking to faithfully follow Jesus.

My own commitment within the Baptist community is to the people amongst whom I bear a common witness to important insights and emphases that are distinctive, and important within the Body of Christ. But I think Paul's caricature of a body that is a whole ear but blind, or a whole foot but dumb, is an important lesson in the mutual recognition of worth and belonging that is both the challenge and the blessing of Christian existence in fellowship. So the Revised Common Lectionary readings are a weekly affirmation that the Bible I read is not mine; and the way I read it isn't the only way; and Baptists aren't the only or even the most careful and faithful readers; and intentional Bible reading as spiritual discipline leading to transformative practice, while a core emphasis in Baptist spirituality, is certainly not a Baptist or Evangelical monopoly game. Indeed when I attend worship in other church traditions, which incorporate the Lectionary readings into the service, the Bible very often has a more integral and fenced place in the worship diet than in those churches that claim to be Bible loving and Bible based.

So – all that said – this week I've been drawn into the Scriptures about the baptism of Jesus. The painting above, by Fra Angelico, has helped to convey the mystery of God in human flesh offering himself in a baptism of repentance. The theological awkwardness of trying to reconcile perfect holiness, perfect humanity and the coming of God into a world fallen and broken, helps explain why the Gospel story doesn't fit our controlling categories – it transcends them. The affirming voice, the descending dove and the submissive Christ, one of those moments in the Bible when the mutual self-emptying love of the Triune God is glimpsed, hinted at, and the proper response is to kneel, wonder, and recall our own baptism into the name of the Triune God of love.

15 January 2009
The dividing wall of hostility – and the Crucified God

I've just watched news pictures of massive explosions in residential Gaza, fired by Israeli aircraft. Then I watched a doctor wipe blood and remove fragments of shrapnel from a child's face. The photos are available on the Internet – I see no acceptable reason to exhibit them here – such anguish. When tears and blood mingle on the wounded face of a child, I find the political rhetoric and the mutual recriminations and vengeance talk of Hamas and Israel evacuated of all moral justification. And I find it the more outrageous that our own Government has so far offered only words, and muted uncommitted words at that.

I don't mean I want to hear words of condemnation directed at either side or both sides. I mean that I want those who represent me to stop the impotent camera viewed hand-wringing, and speak up on behalf of that child. Want? No, I require. I require of those who represent me that instead of hiding behind the undeniable political complexities, ancient enmities, religious and ideological hatreds that make this war an arena of violent despair, I require that my government cease all arms trading with any and all of those engaged in this conflict. The history in recent years of millions of pounds worth of weapons sold to Israel may well mean that some of the ordinance being so graphically demonstrated as if in a sick sales pitch, came from British manufacturers. Hard to do multi-million pound arms deals and still retain any credible moral authority to say in open and unambiguous terms, that the blood and tears of children, in Gaza or Ashkelon, is always intolerable and must not be deemed inevitable let alone acceptable.

In one of the finest older protest hymns in our hymn books, Harry Emerson Fosdick urged, "Save us from weak resignation, to the evils we deplore…Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour." Amongst the virtues absent from much political theatre today, is wisdom and courage. Repeated calls for a cease fire on both sides, when dealing with two intransigent combatant peoples, will require more than mere repetition. So far I've searched amongst the various statements and announcements, without much success, for wisdom and /or courage from those whose veto could stop this.

Meantime, I am on the side of that child, and her brothers and sisters on both sides of that obscene Gaza wall, that "dividing wall of hostility." (Ephesians 2.14 and see Colossians 1.20) Two of my favourite texts, not least because they speak of Christ the peace maker, who through the blood of the cross, demolishes dividing walls of hostility. So while my political representatives use words to avoid causing offence, I'm into another kind of speaking – I'm still praying, for that child and her family, and for other families whose homes and lives are being obliterated on both sides of that, I use the word advisedly, that bloody wall. Because I don't believe for one milli-second, that the blood and tears of that child and all those caught up in this cycle of rage and outrage, are meaningless to the Crucified God who makes peace by the blood of His cross.

Save us from weak resignation

to the evils we deplore….

grant us wisdom,

grant us courage

for the living of this hour.

P.S. My friend Jason points to John Pilger's article, The Death Of Gaza. This is journalism with a conscience, words used as articulated anger and moral scorn, and the heartening refusal of some to be silenced in the face of what are by even the most diluted and qualified definitions, and despite all the politico-ethical gymnastics, war crimes.

13 January 2009
Word centred aspiration and radical peacemaking: Anabaptist Spirituality.

Some time ago I was asked to lead closing devotions for a group of newly settled Baptist ministers. Decided to use some of the material from several books on Anabaptist Spirituality to compile a closing act of worship. Haven't used it since but thought it might be interesting or useful for others – if not, nothing lost.

The etching is of Dirk Willems, (Asperen 1569), an Anabaptist condemned to death for his convictions, who escaped across the castle moat, but his pursuer fell through the ice. Willems turned back to help his pursuer, was recaptured, and then burned. The Anabaptist respect for life, reverence for human flourishing and literalist approach to the Sermon on the Mount are hard to capture more faithfully than in such an act of mercy. Out of that tradition that seeks to follow faithfully after Christ in performative discipleship and radical peacemaking, ideas and words like these come – not only prayer, but Word centred aspiration.

The first gift …

is called the Fear of God,

it is the beginning of all
wisdom

which prepares the path to
life for us.

It trembles at the Word of
God

and enters through the narrow
Gate.

It drives out sin and a
godless life,

diligently watches and
protects its house


The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…

     guard your heart carefully,

       for from it
flow the issues of life.

We are created anew out of
God,

born
of his seed, 1 Pet. 1.23,

made
in his image, Col. 3.10,

renewed
in his knowledge,

become
partaker of his divine nature, Eph. 4.24,

having
new being of the Spirit, John 14.17, 16.13.

In God’s great mercy we have been given new birth into a living hope

     through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,

and into an inheritance that can never perish
or fade –

kept in heaven for us who through faith
are shielded by God’s power….

Christ is everywhere
represented to us as

                humble,
meek, merciful,

              just,
holy, wise, spiritual,

            long-suffering,
patient, peaceable,

          lovely,
obedient, and good,

       as
the perfection of all things;

    for
in Him thee is an upright nature.

   Behold,
this is the image of God,

     of
Christ as to the Spirit

        which
we have as an example

          until
we become like it in nature

            and
reveal it by our walk.

   To this we were called, because Christ
suffered for us,

leaving
us an example that we should follow in his steps…

He himself bore our sins in his body on the
tree

so
that we might die to sins and live for righteousness…

   by his wounds, we have been healed

Just
as one bread is made from many kernels,

And
one drink from many berries,

    So
all true Christians

      Are
one bread and one drink,

        Without
deceit or duplicity,

          In
Christ the Lord.

            He
nourishes us,

              Multiplying
true love and communion.

   How good and pleasant it is when we dwell in
unity,

   devoted
to one another in love,

   honouring one another above ourselves.

Just
as natural bread is made of many grains

    Pulverised
by the mill, kneaded with water,

        And
baked by the heat of the fire,

                  So
is the church of Christ made up of true believers,

        Broken
in their hearts with the mill of the divine Word,

      Baptised
with the waters of the Holy Ghost.

   And
with the fire of pure, unfeigned love, made into one body.

12 January 2009
Evangelical Disenchantment, David Hempton.

David Hempton is one of the best writers on nonconformity and the impact of modernity on various religious traditions. His previous book Methodism. Empire of the Spirit is a superb distillation into one volume of the origins, impact and fortunes of a genuinely world class Christian tradition deep rooted in the Evangelical movement. It is written by a scholar steeped in the sources, critical in the best sense of being informed, and neither so sympathetic nor so antagonistic to those he critiques that he loses sight of their humanity. And Hempton can write – lucid prose, uncluttered by the overfussy ifs and buts of pedantic carefulness, and with the persuasive authority of someone whose attention to detail enriches the broader cultural context. You just know he knows what he's talking about!

So when his new book, Evangelical Disenchantment was announced it became an automatic buy and I'm waiting for that brown cardboard package from you know who. Below is the publisher's blurb. When it arrives it will be an immediate read – not least because I am teaching Evangelical History and Theology this semester. As you will see, this book offers an important and unusual perspective which needs to be heeded, and heard above the orchestrated triumphalism of much contemporary evangelical claims and counter claims.

Here's the blurb:
In this engaging and at times heartbreaking book, David Hempton looks at
evangelicalism through the lens of well-known individuals who once
embraced the evangelical tradition, but later repudiated it. The author
recounts the faith journeys of nine creative artists, social reformers,
and public intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
including such diverse figures as George Eliot, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Vincent van Gogh, and James Baldwin. Within their highly individual
stories, Hempton finds not only clues to the development of these
particular creative men and women but also myriad insights into the
strengths and weaknesses of one of the fastest growing religious
traditions in the modern world.

Allowing his subjects to express
themselves in their own voices – through letters, essays, speeches,
novels, apologias, paintings – Hempton seeks to understand the factors
at work in the shaping of their religious beliefs, and how their
negotiations of faith informed their public and private lives. The nine
were great public communicators, but in private often felt deep
uncertainties. Hempton's moving portraits highlight common themes among
the experiences of these disillusioned evangelicals while also
revealing fresh insights into the evangelical movement and its
relations to the wider culture. It features portraits of: George Eliot;
Frances W. Newman; Theodore Dwight Weld; Sarah Grimke; Elizabeth Cady
Stanton; Frances Willard; Vincent van Gogh; Edmund Gosse; and James
Baldwin.

10 January 2009
Grace, Peace and Fibonacci shaped theology

A couple of theological Fibs. Not aiming at profundity – more interested in the process of packing transformative ideas like grace and peace into sentences shaped by syllable count, forcing a form of minimalism, and thus an interesting form of contemplative musing, theological reflection – perhaps even deliberately formed prayer. So I've also tried to write a few prayers in the same way, up to the 21 syllable line. Thinking of offering one to the congregation on Sunday, (going where this will be OK!), with brief prior explanation and then read together following one of the Epiphany readings on which the prayer is based. Might then post it.

The Van Gogh is there for no other reason than I think it's one of the most remarkable representations of light dispelling darkness, and of hopefulness as the rhythm of recurring vision and earth illumined under the dance of the stars.

Grace

Grace.

Love

emptied

of self-love.

Mercy entangled,

refusing to be free from us.

The giving gift of those inept at calculation.

Peace

First,

help

others

rebuild trust

from broken promises.

Then speak with hope of being heard

above the din of grievance-fed retaliation.

9 January 2009