Today Sheila and I did a longish beach walk at North Berwick – around 6 miles. Blue skies and unbroken sunshine for several hours, later fluffy clouds reflecting on a blue sea, a chain of islands offshore and in the distance a humungous container ship. As we walked we saw a cormorant diving, a golden plover running and olympic sprint, yellow wagtails bouncing across the rocks, oyster catchers sounding like feathered smoke alarms when we got too near, and several small shore flowers we need to look up in the book.
Not only so. But North Berwick has a string of charity shops a couple of which have good second-hand book sections. I celebrated a good day by spending four pounds on John Batchelor's biography of John Ruskin. This strange, opinionated, erudite, humane social reformer, art critic and writer of some of the best prose in the English language, has fascinated me ever since I discovered a book of excerpts from his writing. I'll make a space to read this when I'm away on a reading week soon.
If sabbatical is about getting in touch with the world around then today made for good sabbaticaling.
"The operation of the church is entirely set up for the sinner, which creates much misunderstanding among the smug". (Flannery O'Connor, quoted in Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me, page 54)
"We are not our thoughts. Thoughts come and go. Unacompanied thought pass quickly. Thoughts that are thought about become desires. Desires that are thought about become passions". (Mary Funk, Thoughts Matter, Norris, page 91)
Yesterday I attended the Thanksgiving and celebration service for the life of Dr Ted
Herbert, Vice Principal of International Christian College.
The service
expressed some of the deepest realities of Christian faith – hope
through Jesus Christ, gratitude for a life so fully and fruitfully
lived, celebration of a life given to the service of Christ and His
Church, and a recognition of the loss and sorrow that inevitably
accompanies the death of someone so deeply loved and widely held in
high esteem.
Amongst the qualities Ted brought to his work at ICC was an energy and interest in bringing people and resources together in partnership within the Kingdom. He actively encouraged links and relationships between Colleges and across denominational lines. That is how I first met Ted, and in recent years he has been an important link between ICC and ourselves at several levels of co-operation and shared resources.
Derek Murray was ordained in 1958 and served the newly established pastorate at Glenburn Baptist in Paisley, before moving on to pastorates in Fife, Edinburgh and hospital chaplaincy. In addition Derek taught at the Scottish Baptist College for 46 years, full time for five years and 40 part time. During that time he taught in his own areas of expertise in church history and Baptist History and Principles, in pastoral theology and particularly the care of the dying. But he also taught wider church history and biblical studies from time to time, and overall has been a long and faithful friend of the College, and a highly respected minister amongst our churches.
I shared in a celebration of Derek's ministryover the past weekend. You can read about it at the College blog here
Hymn CD's can either inspire or depress, draw or shove me towards worship or kill devotional intent stone dead, shake up my tired ideas or bore me with cliches, and therefore be a means of grace or a source of annoyance. But now and again we come across a sound and expression of faith that touches most of the positive chords in our particular and personal spirituality – such as it is, and such as I am, at the moment, this music resonates with the deep places of the soul.
Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band have been my equivalent of a devotional companion for years. Their album, Sing Lustily and with Good Courage, was so played, scratched and enjoyed I've bought it again. The combination of Maddy Prior's clear and liquid voice, the authentic 18th Century instruments, and the repristination of hymns by Watts, Wesley, Montgomery and others, have made this for me a regularly taken spiritual tonic. And their much more recent album, Paradise Found, commemorating the tercentenary of the birth of Charles Wesley has for me the same tonic quality. The tunes for some of the better known Wesley masterpieces are different, and if at times I was disappointed and at least uncertain, several listenings have persuaded me that there's more than one way to sing a hymn, even the same hymn!
We listened to Paradise Found driving to Gwennap, with ruined tin mine workings around us, rolling Cornwall countryside, nearly every village with a Methodist meeting place (some of them now converted (ironic word) into lovely houses, or business premises). Take for example, Come O Thou Traveller Unknown, the beautifully spiritualised story of Jacob wrestling, which Wesley transformed into a hymn about the longing soul refusing to let the unknown Saviour go until he tells his name:
….
Wrestling I will not let thee go
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know!
Tis Love!, 'tis Love! Thou diedst for me,
I hear Thy whisper in my heart,
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure Universal Love Thou art!
And the utterly hilarious (I use the word in its true meaning of joyful laughter as the inner dance of the spirit) My God I am Thine. Listening to this as we travelled from Trewint Cottage where Wesley was given hospitality on his first pioneering preaching visits to Cornwall, then down to Truro, was like a step back in time. The sun was shining, the trees were early autumn colours, and the lightness of the music, the sheer exuberance of unembarrassed joy, and the combination of music, colour and historical significance of place, was one of those epiphany episodes you don't plan, and you can only enjoy.
I really would love to hear a modern praise band, bass guitar, drums, some brass, woodwind and strings, and as many other guitars as you like, romping through the theological and spiritual merriment of this hymn:
My God, I am Thine, what a comfort divine,
What a blessing to know that my Jesus is mine!
In the heavenly Lamb thrice happy I am,
And my heart it doth dance at the sound of His Name.
True pleasures abound in the rapturous sound;
And whoever hath found it hath paradise found:
My Jesus to know, and feel His blood flow,
’Tis life everlasting, ’tis Heaven below.
Yet onward I haste to the heavenly feast:
That, that is the fulness; but this is the taste!
And this I shall prove, till with joy I remove
To the heaven of heavens in Jesus’s love.
And so on. I'm well aware of the difficulty post-modern pilgrims like us have with such explicit spiritual experience, distilled into biblical metaphors, and imbibed in a state of uncrtical devotional intoxication, innocent of any hermeneutic of suspicion, and founded as the whole thing is in the biblical metanarrative of redemption, itself cause for much post-modern trembling. But by jings, you just need to have stood in Gwennap Pit, used your imagination, remembered what it is to pray, and then listened to the lilting music of authentic 18th Century instruments accompanying Maddy Prior as as she sings of the 'heaven of heavens in Jesus's love' – there's something about song linked to the deep encounters of the soul, that touches those even deeper realities, and transforms the way we see the world, ourselves and each other – and brings us within reach of the Mystery that is redeeming love.
Sean has drawn attention to an article Mike Bird drew attention to, which was published in the Australian periodical, The Monthly a year or two ago. This kind of hat-tipping dissemination of good stuff is one of the most useful functions of blogs. Thanks to both of you.
The piece in question is by the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and explores the relevance of Bonhoeffer's political theology as a resource for reflection on today's political issues of the 21st Century. There's something unusual but reassuring about a political leader whose intellectual and political life are resourced by such well informed theological reflection. That Bonhoeffer's life and thought is given such prominence in the political theology of a modern political leader is so unusual it is almost a work based experiment in practical and contextual theology.
Some important critiques and correctives of the current politicisation
of religious commitments as vote-catching strategy, while insisting that religious values should inform, shape and resource political life – and in the case of Christian values, do so by speaking truth to power, siding with the vulnerable and marginalised, and refusing to be silenced on matters of social justice and human freedoms. Rudd makes it clear that Bonhoeffer's life and thought provide important, creative, and perhaps for political elites, disruptive guiding principles which have been lived out, and given both theological articulation and embodied witness in Bonhoeffer's story.
Walking home from University after picking up some mail and parcels. Three fragments of conversation provided, if not food for thought, then at least a glimpse into alternative worldviews; on reflection, a triptych that shows the laughable and the likeable, the acceptable and the less acceptable sides of life in a town which has the kinds of problems that have no easy answers. The world according to Paisley……
1. Two women are having a shouted conversation across the High Street. One of them has a birthday and is lamenting her fading looks. A car slows down and stops for the traffic light, cutting off vision and speech. Provokes the non-birthday wumman who shouts "Heh pal! Can ye move yur caur. We're hivin a conversation here!" Sensible driver didn't make eye contact……
2. Three lassies taking up the pavement three abreast, all multi-tasking – talking, chewing gum, and texting. As they passed (or at least as I stood aside to let them pass, cos they weren't for breaking formation – you could just tell), I heard the intriguing story fragment, delivered with automatic pistol speed and threat, "Aye but ma mither says she'll batter his mither if he disnae." If he disnae what, I wondered. And how do they do that – walk, talk, chew and text in a display of skilful synchronised nonchalance?
3. Nearly home when a young guy, I guess third or fourth year from the Grammar, comes up smiles pleasantly and asks, 'Would you mind going intae that shop and getting me fags?" Had to decline, gently and courteously, and he said, "Aye nae worries, Need tae chuck it onyway". Wish he'd asked me to do something I could have done – nice big lad just trying to work out his problems like the rest of us.
Mixed metaphors can be a very effective rhetorical device – even if it's unintentional. So when a leading Financial Strategist with one of the mega-banks that is floundering in debt of its own making, drops such a mixed metaphor with a clang measurable only on the higher decibel range, and does so on the Breakfast News on the BBC, it tends to waken me up. Asked why the failure of Banks to lend to each other was such a damaging issue she said, and I quote:
"Inter-bank lending is the grist that oils the wheels of the economy".
The phrase "grist to the mill" was first used in the English translation of Calvin's Sermons on Deuteronomie, 1583. It means "everything can be used to move toward a profit or conclusion". Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but grist doesn't oil wheels, it gets ground up by wheels, big round stone ones. And inter-bank lending, and the pass the parcel approach to trading in debt,wrapped up in words like 'securities', it is now very clear, doesn't lead to profit or good conclusions, but to the credibility and security of Banks being ground down by the very system they created. The wheels of the economy are not being oiled, their bearings are being burnt out by grist! Or so it seems to this amateur observer of this new mystery religion with dangerous junior deities called Sub Prime, Credit Crunch and Market Meltdown.
One way or another, we're going to have to face up to a world in which we can no longer afford to worship Money and its pantheon of sub-deities. It's the God who has failed – again! The old Scottish version of the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" could make a comeback in a postmodern world which has tended to assume that the globalised market is here to stay. It's an interesting question, the relationship between the origins and development of postmodern culture and the economic and technological assumptions that nourish that culture.
Amongst the fascinating questions surrounding John Wesley is the difficulty of honouring a remarkable Christian without devaluing him by well-meaning but unnecessary hagiography. His faults, like his virtues, were reassuringly human with the usual complications of his own mixed motives, the distortions of other people's partisan opinions and prejudices imposed on an already complex personality, and the flow of a narrative that has to weigh the changing continuities of an unusually long, energetic and mutli-faceted life.
Wesley's Journal is a case in point. Is it accurate reporting of facts or revival propaganda? Is it a field-preacher's travelogue or a vindication of his divine calling? Does it present the real Wesley, or construct a presented Wesley? Should the reader hear Wesley's voice, and if so which voice – the personal voice of religious devotion, the formal voice of a religious leader, the informative voice of an organisational strategist, the combative voice of an innovator under pressure, the self-justifying voice of a controverisal figure? Well, all of them, and at different times in his life these varying voices were more or less dominant. Compared to many religious journals, Wesley's Journal is less an account of inner spiritual states, and more a record of evangelical activism expressed in one long continuous narrative, written like (and often reading like) an audit trail of activity, achievement and strategic planning intended ultimately as a statement of life purpose pursued with persistent faithfulness and relentless attention to detail. The 7 Volumes of the Bicentennial Edition of The Journal and Diaries of John Wesley, are a marvel of scholarly detail, providing in the critical notes the kind of information needed to understand Wesley in the context of his own life experience, against the background of his times, and providing persepctives and correctives that do justice to his position as leader of a movement that changed the religious landscape of Christian Britain, America and beyond.
Richard Heitzenrater is one of the remarkable Wesleyan scholars whose work underlies the editing of the Bicentennial Edition of Wesley's Works. He was one of the supervising Editors for the Journal, and the author of one of the best resources in trying to understand John Wesley, his aptly named book, The Elusive Mr Wesley. For years now I've been a student of Wesleyan theology and spirituality – (and, as a matter of balance, a student of Jonathan Edwards 's thought and spirituality). What intrigues me about Wesley is precisely the word Heitzenrater used, "elusive". There is something comfortingly frustrating about a Christian leader who fits no neat categories, who inspires loyalty and opposition, who claimed lifelong allegiance to his Church, but shaped a dissenting movement, whose written sermons read like treatises and whose preaching while not electrifying like Whitefield's nevertheless carried a potently persuasive voice.
So wherever I go in my travels, I'm looking for Wesley's footprints. And I found a huge one at Gwennap Pit. Methodism made a deep and lasting impact on Cornwall, in the villages, amongst the tin mining communities,and in the main towns. usually liability to subsidence makes a piece of real estate a dodgy deal – but this piece of sunken ground, probably caused by settling over underground mine workings, provided what Wesley later called his amphitheatre. You can read about it here. (http://www.methodistrecorder.co.uk/cornwall.htm)
For myself, I was happy to be in a place so steeped in early Evangelical experience. It's far too easy to dismiss the importance of place, as if there was no such thing as sacred geography. What makes a place like Gwennap Pit special is the story of what happened there, its significance in the story of thousands of hearers, many of whom heard the Gospel, met God, wrestled with their own angels. Indeed that story of Jacob at Peniel, told in one of Charles Wesley's greatest hymns, is a story about an encounter with God that made the place special. Sacred geography, remembered place, where the ground is holy because God was found there, and found to be worth finding.
A couple of extracts from John Wesley's Journal show how Wesley, ever the pragmatist, saw both the practical use, and the sacred purpose, of a hole in the ground!
Sun. Sep 11, 1768 "At five I took my old stand at Gwennap, in the amphitheatre. I suppose no human voice could have commanded such an audience on plain ground; but the ground rising all round gave me such an advantage that I believe all could hear distinctly."
Sun Sep 3 1775 "At five in the evening I preached in the amphitheatre at Gwennap. I think this is the most magnificent spectacle which is to be seen on this side of heaven. And no music is to be heard upon earth comparable to the sound of many thousand voices, when they are all harmoniously joined together singing praises to God and the lamb".