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The sin of impartiality at all costs.

Impartiality in news reporting is like objectivity in history. It's an impossible ideal. Even when genuine attempts at impartiality are made, news reporting is at best an attempt at unbiased reporting of facts – but of course the reporter selects what is shown and said, and states as facts what others are likely to dispute. All reporting comes from a perspective, a specific context, and is articulated in words selected by editors and reporters that inevitably present an angle on the story, even tone of voice and facial expression influencing hearer and viewer. And that doesn't even touch on the complexities of fitting such a story as Gaza in the wider narrative of Middle East politics, national and tribal memories, and centuries old enmities.

To claim to maintain impartiality in such compexity either presupposes there is no right or wrong in any news reporting, or if there is, impartiality requires silence on the moral dimensions of a politically driven military conflict, in order to continue with impartial reporting. Which the BBC has done with enormous credit throughout this most recent episode...prefacing each news bulletin with the scrupulously impartial disclaimer that news reporters were prevented by the Israeli military from entering Gaza during the invasion. So impartial reporting was in fact partial – that is incomplete!

If all that sounds confusing I'm not surprised. But there is a moral philosophical question here that won't go away; it's also a theological ethical and exegetical question:
Moral philosophy: is impartiality so important that it takes precedence over universally recognised human suffering, some of it likely to lead to death? Are there no situations in which other values rank higher in the decision-making process than impartiality? If not, does that mean news reporting is considered free of moral judgement and ethical responsibility?

Theological Ethics: wherever human suffering can be lessened by the actions, even costly actions, of people of goodwill, is there an imperative arising from the value of human life and the evil that is inflicted suffering, that forbids a bystander stance? If a reporter had been travelling with the Good Samaritan, would he or she be exempt from the imperatives of compassion in order not to take sides, or even be perceived as being partial to the victim? I know – the parallel can be pushed too far. But as a follower of Jesus I can't avoid thinking of impartiality as a too expensive luxury in a world of such indicriminate and partial suffering.

Exegesis: Bad enough to stand before the Judge and have to admit, 'When did we see you hungry, imprisoned, naked, and do nothing?' But to say 'Well we did see you hungry, imprisoned, naked – but we didn't broadcast the emergency appeal because we have to preserve our impartiality, and we're not sure the aid could be delivered anyway'.

I do have enormous sympathy for the BBC General Director and the Trustees. They are in a very hard place where the right decision is hard, and costly, to make. But to report with scrupulous care on the suffering of the people of Gaza, accompanied by images of immense suffering and brokenness, and refusing to broadcast an appeal that can bring help, begins to feel like exploitative voyeurism. I don't believe that about the BBC – their reporters are the best in the world. Their honesty and humanity, their skill and professionalism, their ability to report fairly, would not be diminished by broadcasting an appeal whose content they are free to edit and shape around the sensitivites they have to negotiate. But in the end – this is not simply a tactical call to ensure the BBC reputation – it is a moral call that will also affect the BBC reputation.

26 January 2009
Finally Comes the Poet. 1 Reducing mystery to problem.

The following from Walter Brueggemann. Finally Comes the Poet. Daring Speech for Proclamation, (Fortress, 1989), p. 1-2.

"The gospel is too readily heard and taken for granted, as though it contained no unsettling news and no unwelcome threat. What began as news in the gospel is easily assumed, slotted, and conveniently dismissed. We depart having heard, but without noticing the urge to tansformation that is not readily compatible with our comfortable believing, that asks little and receives less.

The gospel is thus a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane. Partly, the gospel is simply an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned. But more than that, our technical way of thinking reduces mystery to problem, transforms assurance into certitude, revises quality into quantity, and so takes the categories of biblical faith and represents them in manageable shapes

Preaching among us happens in this context in which the gospel is greatly reduced. That means the gospel may have been twisted, pressed, tailored, gerrymandered until it is comfortable with technological reason that leaves us unbothered, and with ideology that leaves us with uncriticized absolutes. When truth is mediated in such positivistic, ideological and therefore partisan ways, humaneness wavers, the prospect of humanness is at risk, and unchecked brutality makes its appearance. We shall not be the community we hope to be if our primary communications are in modes of utilitarian technology and managed, conformed values."

…………………………..oooooooooooooo………………………

Walter Brueggemann is one of those writers on the Bible who decisively shapes how we think and shakes up our cherished but unexamined assumptions. Long before he became the doyen of Old Testament scholarship at its provocative best, I've read him regularly. From his early work on the land, the prophets and a quite wonderful book on shalom since reprinted, and then over thirty years of productive writing, he has given the church a constant flow of biblical theology whose foundation pillars are plunged deep into bedrock scriptural text.

Brueggemann is a scholar not always at home in a church at times too keen to buy into the values and techniques of consumer culture and what he calls the hegemony of empire! He is a biblical theologian who deeply reveres the biblical text, a preacher who creatively and disturbingly sets ancient text and contemporary western culture on a collision course. And in his preaching and writing he warns that the church inevitably feels the impact of that text as it allows itself to be too closely aligned with a prevailing culture under judgement.

Over the next while I'll post some further extracts from his lectures on preaching, with the characteristically enigmatic title, Finally Comes the Poet. Daring Speech for Proclamation. This book is now 20 years old, pre-dates fashionably post-modern jargon, and therefore demonstrates Brueggemann's prescience about the dis-ease of consumer driven culture, and the capacity of the biblical text to address postmodern ambiguities with "thickly textured" hopefulness. In this as in all his books, Brueggemann gets under our skin as readers and hearers, by an exegesis of the biblical text as that word from God that tears down and builds up, that breaks open in order to heal deeply, that calls us in question, in order to call us again to obedient grateful living.

25 January 2009
Wherever compassion rears its beautiful head.

Mark 9.38-50 is about Jesus' disciples telling others not to cast out demons in Jesus name; an attempt at a kind of exclusive exorcism franchise, a claim to ministry copyright. You only get the irony of Mark 9.38-50 if you remember what happened earlier in Chapter 9.

Here's the giveaway text at Mark 9.18 : " I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they
couldn’t."

Now failure, if taken rightly to heart, is an education in humility, progress towards a
more honest self understanding, an opportunity to grow. But not for the disciples in Mark’s Gospel. Having failed to
exorcise an evil spirit themselves, they then become the self-appointed
Regional Quality Assurance officers for Exorcisms. Not surprising, that desire
to regulate others, control the boundaries,
– they’d just been having an argument about who is the greatest. Like one of those Blair Brown ambition-fests we used to be treated to, about who would be leader and who the followers.
Jesus had just given the kind of answer that only works in the politics of the Kingdom of God, "Whoever wants to be first, must be last of all and servant of all." And like the self-preoccupied movers
and shakers they believed themselves to be, they didn’t, as John Reid used to
say, ‘get it’.

So failed exorcists with a lust for leadership, presume to
disqualify others from their ministry in Jesus' name, and in doing so unwittingly disqualify
themselves. John Reid (remember him now?) would say, ‘Disciples not fit for
purpose’. In a world with more than its fair share of those powers that dehumanise, violate and contaminate human community, Jesus' words question the right of any of us to erect boundaries, theological or otherwise, around compassionate care for others. Maybe there's a conversion of heart needed so we can hear more clearly Jesus' reply, – generously inclusive, ministry affirming, and welcoming
compassion wherever it rears its beautiful head …”whoever is not against us is
for us.” These words represent Jesus' permission to celebrate compassion, to defend and support those who take on the powers and social forces that diminish human lives – wherever, whenever.

"Whoever is not against us is for us" – That saying urges an ecumenicity of the heart, and it is only possible
when being first is an irrelevance, and being servant of all a priority. "Whoever is not against us is for us", gives not only the benefit of the doubt,
but the benefit of trust and fellowship. To live with such an attitude of openness to
goodness, to see each act of kindness as Christ-serving, to believe each costly
casting out of evil wherever it lurks collaborates with God’s Kingdom, to
recognise, acknowledge and celebrate compassion wherever it radiates into human
lives, is to take on the generous inclusiveness of Jesus who welcomes all the
help the world needs. In fact, service in Jesus' name, inevitably becomes service to Jesus, for inasmuch as you did it to the least of these my sisters and brothers……you did it for me.

The painting above is one of my favourite pieces of Scottish art. The angels are carrying St Bride to visit Christ at the Nativity, embody in their movement and demeanour, dependable compassion and faithful carrying, but also the power of God's goodness let loose in the world. It's included in this post – because I take any excuse to celebrate this beautiful modern Celtic masterpiece by John Duncan. You can see it at the National Gallery of Scotland. Over the years I've spent an hour or three gazing at it.

24 January 2009
“Good is… reality as a whole held in the hand of God”

Good is reality,
reality itself seen and recognised in God.
Human beings,
with their motives and their works,
with their fellow human beings,
with the creation that surrounds them,
in other words,
reality as a whole held in the hands of God –
that is what is embraced by the question of good.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, DBW 6, Ethics, page 53)

Those words written during years of moral and political darkening in Germany and Europe. I took the liberty of putting them in a format that allows slowed down reading.

Guantanamo is to close, thank God. Guantanamo, with its prisoners held behind electrified and razor wire in humiliating, and dehumanising conditions, under the absolute power of their captors; Guantanamo and its military and intelligence personnel who are no less prisoners held behind inner barriers that inevitably dehumanise those who believe their power over others is absolute. Guantanamo is to close.

It is one of the challenges of theology that to make an all inclusive statement like 'reality as a whole held in the hands of God', must therefore include Guantanamo in that reality. It takes with shocking literalness 'He's got the whole world in His hands'; yes Guantanamo too. The military and their prisoners, human beings each caught up in the rage of the wronged.

So when that theologian was himself a prisoner, held, interrogated, tortured then executed by those with totalitarian power over his life, the words quoted above become profound affirmation, radiating a view of God and the world that negates the absolute claims of those forces of darkness that dehumanise. This is theology of hope, taking on the powers of despair, fear and hate, and not being defeated. And going on believing, 'reality as a whole [is] held in the hand of God'.

23 January 2009
Making light bigger

Looking through the new Eerdmans catalogue I came across New Tracks, Night Falling, a new book of poems by Jeanne Murray Walker. Walker is the author of six previous
collections of poetry, including A Deed to the Light and
Coming into History. She is Professor of English at the
University of Delaware, where she has taught for
thirty years. Among her awards are an NEA Fellowship,
an Atlantic Monthly Fellowship at Bread Loaf
School of English, (how good is that for the name of a school!), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and
the Glenna Luschi Prairie Schooner Prize for Poetry.

There's an effective oddity about some of her homespun images, and as a connoiseur of pizza my mind and heart (and maybe stomach) immediately resonated with her use of spinning pizza dough as an image for stretching out light and hope.(See the publisher's blurb below.)

I also like the image on the book cover. Gonnae get this so I am!

…….

"The poems in New Tracks, Night Falling acknowledge that we are people driven and divided by fear. They talk about racism, war, loss, greed, alienation, our disregard of the earth, and our disregard of each other.

Sometimes we feel like night is falling in the bright light of day. Yet we get glimpses of hope, of what could be:

In this dark time I want to make light bigger,
to toss it in the air like a pizza chef,
to stick my fists in, stretching it
till I can get both arms into radiance above the elbow
and spin it above us.

Hope continually threads its way through these poems. We hear its voice as Walker writes about choices — both those we make and those beyond our making.

And we feel hope rising like bread when Walker focuses on the gifts of potential, resolution, mercy, joy — the new tracks that we can make in fresh snow, on old paths, along the roads more or less traveled. These are stays against the falling night.

With a keen eye for both physical and emotional detail, Walker explores a journey that all of us are on, and she does so in a way that speaks to our deep fears and deeper joys, that engages and inspires. Tempering somber notes with more joyful ones, she reminds us of the good things, great and small, that are still possible in this world."

22 January 2009
Benediction as prophetic oracle, personal story, poltical statement…and prayer

One of the longest Benedictions I've ever heard. A complex text of human experience, personal story, national history, biblical faith and political hope. A day when the world was watching and listening, Rev Joseph Lowery a veteran civil rights campaigner, offered prayer on the high balcony of Capitol Hill, America's public architecture of power, partially reconstructed in the 1850's using slave labour. It was a day when inner attitudes went through tectonic shifts. And as I listened to this long Benediction, part confession, part eulogy, part prophetic oracle, and all transparently and unembarrassedly prayed, as a citizen of the world and a human being, I sensed again the importance of hope as a moral stance. And I cried and laughed for sheer pleasure that a prayer could say so much – not only the words, but the human life of the one who spoke it, and the multi-millions of lives on whose behalf he prayed.

There's already been criticism of the comment about "white will embrace what is right". And I think I understand the sensitivities of those hurt by this singling out of one human colour for moral censure – especially the thousands of white civil rights campaigners who walked alongside Rev Lowery and others down through the decades. That's why I think it has to be read and heard as a complex text; the long and bitter experience of the man who prayed, the history of a nation, and the miracle of hoped for and long in coming change, is reflected in a prayer personal, political, prophetic, and reflecting the very tensions that made the day fraught with possibility.

The text has been released by the Federal News Service, and I was glad to read it again – but it's nothing without the quiet defiant hopefulness of the Rev Lowery's gruff, at times breaking, but affirmative voice. So you can also see and hear it over at You Tube.

……………………..

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has
brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might led us
into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet
stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts,
drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy
hand may we forever stand — true to thee, O God, and true to our
native land.

We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we've shared this
day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack
Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his
administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the
national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know
you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation,
but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though
pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

For we know that, Lord, you're able and you're willing to work
through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness,
heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the
least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president,
to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to
achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed
— the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind
of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a
spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president
by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to
turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to
make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion,
not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit
of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power
back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our
mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won't get
weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone,
with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not
lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors,
when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and
fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like
waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest,
and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that
day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick
around — (laughter) — when yellow will be mellow — (laughter) —
when the red man can get ahead, man — (laughter) — and when white
will embrace what is right.

Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: Say amen —

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: — and amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen! (Cheers, applause.)

21 January 2009
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