Blog

Ouch! Remember Lot’s Wife?

Lot's wife. She looked back didn't she? The sensible way to move forward is to face the front. Yes?

Walking to the car park at Braehead I heard a horn blast and a screech of tyres. I turned round to see what was happening. Like Lot's wife, I looked back. But I kept walking at a brisk pace. Since nothing happened I turned round to face forward. My timing has always been good. Whether it's hitting a dead ball, volleying a high ball, or heading a ball providing I could reach it, the important thing to generate force is to co-ordinate the speed of the projectile and the co-ordinated speed of body and head or foot at the point of impact.

My timing is still good. As I turned round, still walking briskly, the side of my face connected with alarmingly good timing with a large cold, hard, shiny steel lightpost!

##@@**@@##!

My eyebrow, my cheekbone and my jawbone, propelled by my body speed and given added impetus by my head turning to the front, all made a precise and simultaneous connection with the post.

Result? A cut eyebrow that will almost certainly be a black eye in time for sympathetic pastoral comment on Sunday, a bruised cheekbone and a tender jawbone. Oh, and a badly bruised ego

21 November 2008
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

Regular readers of this blog will know I'm not a Jonathan Ross fan. So please note that the book pictured here is by one Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, (New Haven: Yale, 2001). This book is utterly absorbing because based on original research, with masses of material organised around an overall theme, and then written with verve and an evangelistic zeal to persuade. Rose has unearthed and illustrated the significance of the working class autodidact – the self taught scholar whose learning is the result of self-motivation towards improvement and a latent yet persistent intelligence and hunger for knowledge that will not be frustrated by being denied social opportunity.

Books about reading are irresistible to the long confirmed and happily resigned to their personal fate bibliophile. But when such a book is also a window on social development and human aspiration, and in addition acts as a catalyst for recalling my personal memories and reinforcing some of my least negotiable political convictions, then it is given a space on the shelf reserved for books to be read straight through, without the diversion of anything else being read at the same time. This is a book for those drizzly, dreich weekends, to be read while fortified by the good things of life. Not piecemeal chapter a day lift and lay, but wholesale undiverted attention.

Rose explains and illustrates why it is that reading and learning has been such a a formative human activity these past couple of centuries. reading him you learn the importance of the Everyman Library, consider the significance of facts like this – Scottish weavers were amongst the most literate citizens of 18th and 19th C Scotland; (David Livingstone wasn't the only one who propped latin books on his weaver's beam). No wonder the Scottish Lowlands had 'one of the highest literary levels in the world in the late 18th century', creating a community in which the Waverley Novels and the poetry of Byron and Moore fired the minds and imagination of thousands of day labourers. And then there was John Christie 'the literary shepherd', who amassed a library of 370 volumes which included complete sets of the Rambler, Spectator and Tatler, and who was one of an entire culture of self-taught agricultural workers who used their isolation in the bothy to read. And much more of the same.

But Jones is pursuing an even bigger goal – he is exploring how working folk read – read texts of all kinds, including books, newspapers, lectures, sermons, plays, films, radio broadcasts. In other words this is a book about how people excluded from elitist education, nevertheless learned for themselves how to read the world. This is a history of working class independent hermeneutics, in which Rose provides "an intellectual history of people who were not expected to think for themselves". But who did, and with remarkable social and historical consequences.

My two grandfathers could remember older Lanarkshire miners in Shotts, early in the Twentieth Century discussing the atonement, socialism and other "intellectual" questions at the coal face, while eating their "pieces".* And my grandmother, the wife of a miner, (who had full sets of Dickens, Scott, Dumas, and several editions of Burns), knew as much about the Waverley novels, the social context of Walter Scott, and was as aware of the distortions caused by such historical romanticising of Scotland's history as any academic expert of her own time. Of my four grandparents, she is probably most responsible for that wonderful gene that makes a love of reading hereditary!

* A "piece" in Scotland refers to the home made packed food workers took to their work. And a "play piece" the food taken to school in the absence of crisps, chocolate and other unheard of extravagances!

20 November 2008
The dangerous politics of presumed consent, or the generous freedom of the Gift.

The Westminster and Scottish Governments are again considering the issue of a shortage of organ donors and the arguments for and against presumed consent. Lying behind the urgency, and apparent moral validity of the move to establish a norm of presumed consent, there are the very human stories of considerable suffering for those awaiting donor organs, and an underlying anguish made worse for patients and their families by the anxiety of a long indefinite wait, often against a reducing time deadline. Any reasonable and ethically defensible course of action that might mitigate such suffering and make for more hopeful outcomes, should surely elicit the support and co-operation of everyone for whom humane compassion and generous care for the other are key principles of human community.

However, the UK Organ Donation Taskforce has concluded in its recently published report that presumed consent would be unlikely to boost organ donation, and have not therefore recommended such a far reaching change in the law. To be sure there are countries like Austria and Spain where presumed consent is the norm and they have high levels of registered organ donors. By contrast in the UK only 25% of those eligible have registered despite widely acknowledged estimates that a large majority of the eligible population are in favour of organ donation. The frustration such an anomaly causes further strengthens the case for presumed consent, it is claimed. Further, the current debate is about "soft presumed consent", that is, if the law were changed to make presumed consent the norm, next of kin would be able should they wish, to withold consent to organ removal for transplant purposes, and their veto would be upheld.

A number of reasons were given by the Taskforce for rejecting presumed consent as a viable way forward. First, while in countries that do operate presumed consent the number of donors is impressively higher, the explanation is thought to lie elsewhere than in the policy of presumed consent. In these countries greater resources are invested in increasing and maintaining public awareness of the benefits to others, and in promoting programmes of social education and support throughout the entire process of recruiting and registering donors.

Second, the Taskforce believes that presumed consent would significantly undermine trust in the medical profession, and the capacity of medical professionals, under pressure from several directions, to deal with conflicting claims of those requiring organs and those potential donors who may have serious illness or injury. Whether such conlicts are real or perceived, public trust is largely based on perception, and if the public perception is less positive then the consequence would still be a serious loss of trust in the core relationship of patient and doctor.

Third, the Taskforce believes that presumed consent would eliminate the concept of "gift". When a recipient is given the organ of another human being, the fact that the organ is donated is an act of generosity, free and gratis. Knowledge of that "giftedness" is an essential element in the emotional reconciliation between the host body and the donated organ, and plays no small part in the recipient patient's future emotional and mental health. For recipients and their families presumed consent lacks the element of free gift, that willing surrender of the self that is profoundly characteristic of the key moments of human exchange.

Now a Christian approach to such a morally complex and emotionally charged debate will surely include a careful consideration of all the above. And the tone and character of the debate should reflect the life or death nature of the questions involved, and these as felt from both sides. But there is at least one nexus of Christian truths and insights that move the discussion to a different level. It is the Christian understanding of a human being as created by God with an identity and value that is inherent in each created being. And a core element in defining the nature of humanity and the dignity of each human being, is the capacity for moral freedom and ethical choice.

The legal terminology of presumed consent masks a highly dangerous and morally unacceptable claim. Who has the right to presume any "presumed consent"? If the law is changed to enact it, presumably the state. But what exactly is being presumed? That a human being's body is not inviolate but may be "used" on the authority and preumed ownership of another; in this case the State. Such a utilitarian view when applied to human beings and human bodies implies a process of commodification, and the human body becomes one more resource, which the state can presume it is free to use, (albeit for beneficent purposes), unless a prior opt out disclaimer is registered. That I believe runs flat contrary to a Christian view of human beings, human bodies and human life as defined in Christian theology and ethics.

The state has no right to presume any ownership of a person; has no right to legislate into existence a presumed right to use parts of a human body without explicit consent; has therefore no right to impose by law presumed consent in the absence of an explicit denial. If presumed consent were introduced, I would then have to opt out of a legally imposed situation in order to retain ownership, control and freedom over my own body. Which means (by a legal sleight of hand), that ownership, control and freedom over my body has already been presumed by the state and ceded by me, till I take it back.

It has not, and cannot. For a Government to presume my consent by legal enactment, it must first presume such a degree of power over me that it can take to itself the right to make decisions about the use of my body. It has no such power, and to seek such power by legal enactment would be to establish in law a dangerously reductionist view of what a human being is. It would signal an equally dangerous assumption of state power over human life and freedom that has no political or moral justification.

All that said, Christian compassion and pastoral considerations cannot be content with the status quo of acute donor shortage in a population apparently largely in favour of organ donation. That the Government is now making £4 million available for an education and awareness campaign seems an obvious and responsible first step – but the amount doesn't seem to equate to the importance and urgency of the issue. But secondly, as a Christian I belong to a faith tradition in which self-giving for the sake of the other is a central ethical and theological value, rooted indeed in my understanding of God. That has significant purchase on such socially responsive and responsible issues as being a blood donor, a registered organ donor, a strategic and generous donor of money and energy in the service of others. Then there is the importance of pastoral experience. I have accompanied several people whose lives have depended on the "gift" of another human being's organ. The profound emotional, moral and spiritual experience of the recipients takes them and those who love them to the far edges of human courage, wonder, gratitude and trust. The gift of life is like no other gift.The Taskforce were right to highlight this, and to affirm its moral and spiritual importance.

In a culture still in shock at the ongoing consumerist catastrophe, a reaffirmation of the inalienable worth and dignity of every human life is both a required corrective witness and a crucial social goal. Our Governments at Westminster and Edinburgh are going to have a hard job educating us all in the importance of socially responsive compassion, and resetting mindsets away from me, money mine. Organ donation and the concept of the "gift" require a different mentality and morality from value for money and bottom line imperatives of contemporary consumerism. For more than a generation, the self-centred lifestyle sustained by consumer commodities and celebrity focus has dominated (perhaps suppressed) moral aspiration.

For in my own admittedly personal view, our willingness to donate our organs, our blood, our money, our time and energy, and all of these for the good of others – is a moral question not a political or economic one. It is about how we view our own life in relation to others. It's about how as a Christian I look on other people's suffering and think with critical compassion of what that person's situation requires of me as a follower of Jesus. Beyond my Christian commitment I am also a citizen and a member of the human family. That too brings gift and obligation – somewhere in this mess of a world these two ideas need to be invested again with moral purpose and human possibility. You cannot legislate generosity and a sense of responsibility for others – perhaps communities that celebrate the grace of God in worship can again find the energy and imagination to embody that generous self giving love in ways that act as salt and light.

And one further thought. When each Christian community gathers around the table of communion, and takes bread and breaks it, and hears the words, "This is my body which is for you", "This my blood shed for the sake of many", we assent both to the final truth of who God is, and to the lifestyle that flows in worship and gratitude from such a source of Love. In Christian discipleship the link is explicit and essential between the Eucharist, and that giving of ourselves in love and service to God and others, in Jesus name, in the power of the Spirit.

.

19 November 2008
Caravaggio’s “Jesus Calls Saints Peter and Andrew”.

Today I was in Edinburgh doing important things. I had lunch with Sheila at the Queens Gallery Mews restaurant and had the best carrot soup ever, followed by a slab of millionaire shortbread with toffee a minimum of 1 cm thick. We then met up with oor Aileen for an early afternoon coffee (and for her a late lunch), and I borrowed my car back for a while!

But before that.

We visited the Queens Gallery Baroque Exhibition where I wanted to sit and gaze at Carravagio's "Jesus Calls St Peter and St Andrew". This sumptuous painting was on the news recently – as part of the Royal Collection it was assumed it was an early copy. But no – it's the original masterpiece and it has now been restored and is on view till early 2009.

The scene is from Mark's Gospel, "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men". The first surprise is the artist's assumption that Peter and Andrew are middle aged while Jesus is an unbearded youth. Not sure what to make of this – I suppose I never thought about relative ages of the disciples. And if Peter's mother in law was still around, and was ill but healed by Jesus, I suppose that would suggest Peter wasn't that old, at least not as old as in this painting?

Then there's Peter's neck – strong, corded, thick, and his hands, one holding fish and the other held out in a gesture of….what? The choice is between the fish and his liveliehood, or the emtpy hands of the disciple who leves it all and follows, and finds life. Peter's hand is at the centre of the painting, and has a three dimensional effect – it is open, empty, the gesture of a reasonable man questioning an unreasonable command. Andrew's hand is pointed at himself as if to say, Who? Me? You serious? And Jesus hands point to the future offstage, a gesture towards the unknown but travelling in the direction he points.

The contrast of the dark background in the top half of the painting and the shadow of light coming from the direction Jesus points, gives the painting a dramatic effect – not least because the only light part of the background is also on the shadow side of the figures. Not sure what that means – even if it means anything, other than that in the sharp crisis of decision, nothing is certain, obvious or predictable. Peter and Andrew are faced with an outrageous lack of options- fish or follow, stay or go, the safety of status quo or the risk of everything. Incredulity, confusion and no time to think it through; sometimes the greatest opportunities come once if at all.

What I can't easily convey, and what is lost in any print, scan or e-image of this painting, is the quality of light that spills from the faces, reflecting the mystery of revelation. You have to see it, sit before it, gaze at it, and feel the theologically charged impact of colour. The supernatural light is given added force by the white sash across Jesus shoulder and chest, reflected on Andrew's face, and creating an aura of concentrated intensity on each of the faces.

If I'd gone to Edinburgh, got off the train, walked to Holyroodhouse, sat for 15 minutes before this painting and then come home – it would have been more than worth it. My ticket allows me to have a years free entry to the Queen's Gallery – I'll be back every time I'm in Edinburgh. As a commentary on one of my favourite Gospel stories, it beats any amount of scholarly words.

17 November 2008
What are the benchmark statements on Christian leadership?
Yesterday I shared in the funeral service for Jim Wood, one of the finest Christian leaders I've ever known, and one of Scotland's most committed Baptists. I'll finish this post with an extract from what I shared about Jim in the funeral service. Reflecting through the week on the life and character of this remarkably able and unselfconsciously modest man, led me to some interesting thoughts about the way we think about leadership.

Leadership has many styles, and God's gift of leadership needn't always demonstrate the same virtues and qualities. Jesus was a leader – though I'm not sure I'm entirely comforable with a word so compromised by power baggage – but the style of leadership, the way Jesus exercised authority, the goal and end of his 'leadership initiatives', were responsive to context and situation, and to the people in those situations and contexts.

There is in the life and ministry of Jesus that kind of leadership
- which takes initiative with loaves and fishes and makes things happen
- which invites trust and risk in leaving the safety of the boat for the turbulence of the waves
- which silences argument and heals wounded relationships by taking a basin and towel
- which stops and asks the name of Legion, touches the scars of the leper, and throws parties for the unwanted and too easily ignored
- which teaches prayer by doing it and so encourages discipleship by embodying obedience to the Father
- which 'wastes time' that could be used 'more productively', talking at the well with a woman to help her move beyond what we now call 'a chaotic lifestyle'
And so on. The whole Christian leadership thing has become a major area of study, contention, training, and concern, in churches looking for ways to survive, to grow, to be seen to be alive and relevant. And it's right to constantly explore and review how the dynamics of the Christian community work. But also in doing so to repeatedly, regularly, persistently, compare what we are saying and practising with the life and example of the One in whose name that leadership is expressed and all sharing of the Good News authorised.

As I reflected on the character, life commitments, behaviour and influence of Jim Wood, I came to realise that he embodied a form of leadership which could never develop from intentional task-focused training, or from programmatic initiatives and approaches aiming to 'grow' leaders. There are times when our definitions of leadership, as strategically focused and missionally practical as they are (and perhaps need to be), are nevertheless far too pragamtic. There are other, perhaps as important styles of leadership which embody something less tangible and more crucial – a spirit of loving awareness and other-centred service in which we see authentic glimpses of Jesus, through which we recall loaves and fishes, gale lashed waves, welcomed strangers, a basin and a towel. Out of such a spirit comes the capacity to be the medium of a gospel of reconciliation, a conduit of that honest to goodness sincerity that touches lives with the gentle push in the right direction, which we call grace. Such is a style of leadership crucial to the health of our Baptist fellowships as discerning communities, which few are able to exercise. But Jim Wood did.

Jim
was a Christian, a Baptist Christian. His attendance at the church’s meetings,
at Denominational Assembly and organisational gatherings was because he
believed in the gathered church meeting for worship, prayer, and discerning
together the mind of Christ. Natural courtesy, his measured thought, his
moderated words, genuine belief in the importance of listening to the voice of
Christ through the voices of individuals in the community of the Spirit, meant
that his was an important presence. Not least because it would never have
occurred to him that his voice carried more weight than anyone else’s.

The qualities
of curiosity and open-mindedness,
of inner conviction and community involvement,
of courtesy and conversation, meant that Jim was ideal in the always important
role of Conciliator. Leadership
takes many styles in contemporary church life; Jim Wood would never have
claimed to be a leader. But he was.

Inevitable tensions arise in the life of a
healthy church, relationships become strained, misunderstanding or disagreement
can develop. At such times every church needs those rare people who can see
both sides of the argument and understand the different feelings and responses.
They can interpret, bridge-build, calm hurt feelings and enable good
communication. There is a form of leadership which looks to guide and encourage
good decision-making by the pastoral care of those in danger of becoming too
involved in their own agendas.
16 November 2008
The Six Random Things Meme
Simon Jones has tagged me for a meme thingy. I don't like memes and only do them to avoid offending very nice people – like Simon – and Brodie – who done this to me last year. So here's the deal. I'll do it but I'm not going to tag another 6. Anyway like Simon I have a limited range of blog-friends and certanly couldn't reach 6 as yet unmemed bloggers.

The rules are

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. (Sorry cannae dae that)
5.
Let each person know they've been tagged and leave a comment on their
blog. (Cannae dae this either)
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Now. Six random things about myself…….
1. I once learned to dance the sailor's hornpipe as part of the 1965 Lanark Lanimer Day parade, and our entry (Romance through the Ages) won the whole shebang and I got my name and photo in the Carluke Gazette complete with sailor's uniform and shoulder length hair!! Just so you don't think that was a fluke – I was also a Peer in our school production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe and I can still sing most of the songs – for a credit crunching fee.
2. I have been a lifelong fan of Country & Western Music and have actually listened to and enjoyed Little Jimmy Dickens singing "Sleeping at the foot of the bed", Hank Snow's nasal twang wailing through "Hobo Bill's Last Ride", and some even sadder crooner singing "May the bird of paradise fly up your nose. But I also bought and played till it was unplayable Johnny Cash's San Quentin Live Concert, same singer's Man in Black Album and now enjoy a whole slew of female progressive country artistes but not saying who – except Mary Chapin Carpenter.
3. My first car cost £50, and was a ford anglia which was so rusted it needed two new doors a new bonnet, bootlid and new sills. The bonnet was blue, the boot lid was silver, the sills were black, two doors were brown and the rest of the car was scarlet. It was stolen in Glasgow and I had to give a description to the police who wondered why anyone would bother stealing it – or reporting it stolen!
4. I think a land flowing with Chai Tea Latte would be just as enticing as a land flowing with milk and honey.
5. I am going on Monday to Edinburgh to see the newly discovered Caravaggio of Jesus Calling Peter, as part of the Baroque exhibition. While there I'm having lunch with my daughter, retrieving my car and doing a wee book shop crawl.
6. Against the current cultural stream, and despite much benign and well intentioned persecution, I still like wearing a tie even if I don't have to as part of the traditional power dressing game. Probably says something about my well known insecurity and reserved, perhaps even shy, disposition……..
Promised I wouldn't tag anyone, but I've enjoyed the spur of the moment oddity of doing this.
14 November 2008
Archbishop Robert Leighton (1611-1684) – a God-sent eirenicon for a violent age

One of the most attractive figures in the history of the Scottish Church was Archbishop Robert Leighton. In an age of theological extremes, inter-communal violence and intransigent "Christian" hostilities, he was a man of peace, a conciliatory spirit, to his opponents a man of compromise, to his admirers a God-sent eirenicon. The life and work of Leighton, and in particular the contrasting pieties of such as Leighton and Rutherford, the eirenic spirit of the former and the passion for Gospel purity of the latter, suggest fundamental differences in faith that were ultimately irreconcilable. Both men embodied in such a collision of contrasts, something of the tragedy of recalcitrant religion, when personal spiritual experience and its doctrinal confession are of such intensity that they can neither be questioned by others nor left unspoken, whatever the cost. Even if that cost is bloody conflict.

In the history of Scottish Christian piety, doctrinal collisions, spiritual suspicion, political conflict, ecclesiatical self-interest, are all the stuff of tradition formation – like tectonic plates grating against each other, now and then colliding and recoiling, only coming to an accommodation when the contrary energies are absorbed by impact, so theological traditions are shaped. And people like Leighton are far too often overlooked when the time comes to identify 'the movers and the shakers', and 'the significant players', the ones later history writers place centre stage.

Leighton, and his student Henry Scougal, are two men of moderate spirit, whose spirituality of peaceableness remains one of the glories of the Scottish Episcopal tradition. Here is Leighton, relegating historical research to its proper place:

But when all is said and done there is one only blessed story, wherein our souls must dwell and take up their rest: for amongst all the rest we shall not read…come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest: and never any yet that tried Him, but found him as good as his word.

The Works of Robert Leighton, with life by J. Aikman (1860), xvi.

Scotland has produced many important biblical commentaries over the centuries, and some of those now called 'pre-critical', remain as important historical and theological depositories illustrating how texts were received, interpreted and brought to bear on life. Amongst the most celebrated was Leighton's 1 Peter, almost continually in print for over three centuries. As devotional commentaries go, and as an example of Puritan exposition, it remains a milestone of practical divinity spelt out in exhaustive detail by one whose gentleness of spirit made all his writing pastoral before polemical.

13 November 2008
Fighting the good fight doesn’t mean punching others’ lights out in Jesus’ name!

Two stories from AOL News.

1. If you want to make sense of the picture, have a read at this.

Same scandal as last year at Christmas – and this time it made the BBC Sunday evening news, linked to the story covering the Calzaghe v Jones boxing match.

Suggested relevant Scripture verses please?

My own suggestion – "Jesus wept".

And then this:

2. Workers at Salisbury Town Hall, in Wiltshire
were told they should not utter the ancient cliche, "singing from the same hymn sheet", because its
religious connotations could hurt the feelings of unbelievers.

The directive said: "Avoid office and council
jargon wherever possible, including phrases such as 'moving forward' or
'singing from the same hymn sheet'. Not everyone understands these
phrases – some can actually cause offence (what would an atheist want
with your hymn sheet?)"

With apologies to the author of John's Gospel, "Jesus laughed".

10 November 2008
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Remembrance Sunday and the blessing of the world

Today is Remembrance Day. Earlier this week I had a Bonhoeffer day. I read the editor's introduction to Life Together in the Fortress Edition, and then several favourite passages from Discipleship. Then in the afternoon I watched the DVD Bonhoeffer. Agent of Grace, which is proably as careful and honest a portrayal as I've seen or read. Little by way of hagiography, as Ulrich Tukur portrayed the soul searing tension with which Bonhoeffer lived his last years, exploring the moral ambiguity of our actions over and against the ethical imperative and inclination of the soul to act in the real world in faithfulness to Christ.

|Later, reading an important fragment included in the volume Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940-1945, I became very aware of why it is that I love Bonhoeffer – I don't just mean I love reading his writings, studying his thought, even tracing his biography and history. I mean something altogether more radically human and authentically theological. In the communion of saints, I feel a deep sense of privilege and bafflement, that this man I could never have known, who died 6 years before I was born, is one to whom in Christ, I am nevertheless bound, by eternal yet human ties of love, into that great interpersonal reality that is the Body of Christ, Sanctorum Communio. And on Remembrance Sunday, I remember the theology and spirituality that animated and fired him with love of life, and forged that integrity which will always choose what makes for life, even if it means dying. In a world where "the song of the ruthless" (Isaiah 25) is still heard, Bonhoeffer speaks again in a voice redolent with promise and trust:

The world lives by the blessing of God and of the righteous and thus has a future. Blessing means laying one's hand on something and saying: despite everything, you belong to God. This is what we do with the world that inflicts such suffering on us. We do not abandon it; we do not repudiate, despise or condemn it. Instead we call it back to God, we give it hope, we lay our hand on it and say: May God's blessing come upon you, may God renew you; be blessed, world created by God, you who belong to your Creator and Redeemer.

(Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 1940-1945, page 674).

9 November 2008
Manchester, Obama celebrations, Pre-Raphaelites and Bookshop dissonance……

Just returned from my say cheerio to Sean trip to Manchester. Turned out to have all the most important ingredients in abundance.

Met with Catherine (married to Sean), Sophia and Lucy ( two delightful daughters) and so made three new friends. They are a family skilled in welcome, and where hospitality includes inducting the guest into the delights of CBBC. Then there was the bonfire and fireworks party (actually a mini street party chez Winter) doubling up as both Guy Fawkes commemoration and Obama celebration, (complete with pre-printed Obama badges universally distributed to all attendees by Sophia) and sustained through the cold by Sean's gourmet pumpkin soup and piles of rolls and sausages, apples and tangerines.

Good conversations with Sean and others about the next stages of life, the logistics and the plans, the new job and the new country. All very exciting, only tinged with the (slightly selfish) sadness that distance might be a factor in future opportunities to sit, talk and enjoy.

Had a varied cultural day on Thursday on which I'll post later. Just to say I went to the Holman Hunt and Pre-Raphaelite exhibition and the Manchester City Gallery and saw several versions of Hunt's 'The Light of the World.' I also saw paintings I hadn't known about, and a couple I did and was so pleased to see – not least 'The Scapegoat', a painting of powerful imaginative pathos.

Part of the day was a visit to the John Rylands Library. As I walked in I thought of F F Bruce, that great Scottish Evangelical NT scholar closely associated with Manchester and the John Rylands Library. Bruce did so much to erode the bulwarks of academic suspicion that all but excluded evangelicals from the higher echelons of academia. Some time it will be important to properly assess the influence of people like Bruce in redeeming evangelical scholarship from its own defensiveness. And the John Rylands building! What a masterpiece of Gothic showing off! But my main mission was to see Papyrus 457, that tiny fragment of the earliest part of the NT we have – itself a work of art, painstaking strokes of ink painting on papyrus, words about the Word. Just realised that works as Haiku.

Painstaking strokes of
ink, painting on papyrus,
words about the Word.

As a piece of spoil-sport reality crashing in on such cultural peregrinations, I also found Wesley Owen Bookshop and the Catholic Truth Society Bookshop just round the corner. I, the patron saint of impulse book buyers and incorporating those who will buy a book to mark any occasion that serves as excuse, bought nothing in either of them. They are two examples of what happens when bookshops stock only what is theologically congenial to the dominant clientele. I am left wondering what the underlying message is when a shop only sells what certain sales managers think is congruent with the true gospel message, as they see it, from their perspective, as represented by their company / branch of the church, over and against those who, when it comes to key essentials, are, by and large, more or less, wrong!

In one I could buy Banner of Truth and in the other Ave Maria Press; I could have Raymond Brown on Hebrews in one, or Raymond Brown on John in the other – the first was a Baptist minister, beloved expositor and Principal of Spurgeon's College, the second a Jesuit NT Scholar who was a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Both shops had music playing, – one a gently insistent Benedictine chant, the other was a hymn compilation that happened to be playing Amazing Grace – and as I listened to Newton's hymn, I smiled at the subversive activity of the Holy Spirit – the Benedictine chant had been playing in Wesley Owen bookshop, and 'Amazing Grace' in the CTS, – perhaps a gesture of impatience from the One who urges the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace.

Time spent in the MLK Library was mainly given over to reading a particular book I want to finish, and burrowing in unfamiliar journals like a manic truffle hunter. Came away with several heavily annotated slips of scrap paper with references to articles, books to go looking for and various other fragments of data that, like the jars of screws, nuts, ball beairings, clips, clamps and nails in my father's shed, are captured and kept because 'they might come in handy some time'.

Tomorrow I preach in my own church in Paisley – Remembrance Sunday. And Isaiah 25 which begins with a hymn about a dangerous world, and the acts of God that 'silence the song of the ruthless'. In Congo and Darfur, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Gaza and Israel, in the US and the UK, the song of the ruthless has drowned out the cries of complaint for long enough.

8 November 2008