Sometimes I need to hear a voice that doesn't mess about. Spirituality is notoriously hard to define, there's still a big argument about whether it's a subject for academic study in its own right, and often enough, even when limited to Christian Spirituality, the diversity of tradition makes it hard for us even to agree what we are talking about. And maybe we are more comfortable with an unexamined pluralism of ideas, experience and styles of spirituality, than with taking a position in which we speak with clarity and conviction about what is so. At which point Bernard of Clairvaux's astringent words are a shout for silence in this spiritual marketplace dedicated to personal choices, acting like a theological cleansing of those temples we like to build and decorate to our own spiritual specifications:
So you wish to hear from me why and in what way God is to be loved. Here's my answer: The cause of loving God – it's God himself. And the measure – it's to love God without measure.
Simple really – and such a hard call. Not as easy as I thought, this spirituality stuff! Nobody said anything about absolutes! But then Bernard pre-dates postmodernist sensitivities. Actually, Bernard doesn't go much for any sensitivities that depend on letting us have our cake and eat it. His booklet, On Loving God, is one of a number of Texts I Travel With. And one of its strengths is that it recognises some essentials are precisley that – non-negotiable goals and practices of Chjristian living.
You can find the text of On Loving God online, here. I prefer to use the Classics of Western Spirituality Edition, edited by G R Evans – I suppose I'll always prefer book to screen.
So the Priest and the Levite passed by on the other side. And ever since we have assumed those two patron saints of the Don't Get Personally Involved Society, represent the way people other than oursleves might react to a man lying hurt on the road. The Good Samaritan, however, is the one we imagine ourselves to be, faced with a similar incident.
Yesterday on the way to church I came to the junction with Glasgow Road and as I checked the traffic to my right, 20 metres away, lying in the middle of the road, holding a bunch of pink balloons, was a young black man. Cars were passing by on the outside lane; that piece of road is on a hill and at a bend, and is where speed limits are routinely ignored. I didn't know if he had been hit, or was ill, or drunk or what – but what was obvious was his life was in serious danger. None of the cars were for stopping; several walkers on the other side of the road looked curiously but kept walking.
I left the car, ran towards him, waving to traffic to stop or slow down, and when I reached him he was lying looking vacantly at the sky, till I spoke. He focused his eyes, and it became clear he was returning from a party and had decided he needed to sleep. I pulled him up, he stumbled to the pavement, asked where he was, said he needed to get to Glasgow. Refused a lift, made it clear he didn't want company, was clearly disoriented but determined to go, and so he made his uncertain way back along Glasgow Road. I watched for a while till he was safely out of sight, and then went to church.
I still wonder if he made it. If I should have called the police. If it was drink or drugs that had rendered him not only helpless, but life threateningly careless. I sat in church wondering, and worrying. Which raises the interesting question about that Good Samaritan parable. If you have compassion, if you care, if you get involved, it isn't just the use of your donkey and the settling of someone else's expenses; the care itself has some cost attached to it. Worry for the other, even if that other is someone you've never seen before and might never see again, is the inbuilt cost of compassion.I have the uncomfortable feeling I should have done more but don't know what. Now if I'd taken my normal route and gone down our street instead of up the street – I'd never have seen him and saved myself unnecessary worry. Hmmmmm – not sure about that. Hope he's OK though.
uox faz –
if you're wondering what that means, it's the result of Gizmo padding
across my keyboard on his way to the kitchen to demand, require, insist
on being fed. Ever since he spent a week in the cattery during our
recebt Cornwall holiday he's been acting like a spoilt feline, alternating between
sychophantic purring and feed me now caterwauling. So I suppose "uox
faz" might be feline-speak for"ban sabbaticals and or holidays".
I heard yesterday of the death of a special friend who has been part of my life journey since 1967. As a teenager whose life was all over the place I encountered the Rev Charlie Simpson. The result was my first raid into Carluke Baptist Church where I met several remarkable people. And maybe with their permission I'll tell you about them, and why they are landmarks in my own faith journey. One of them was Mrs Simpson, "the minister's wife". Jeanette Simpson and her husband Charlie took an immediate interest in me, despite my unenviable reputation in the town as a teenager. When I was converted on April 16, 1967 it was Charlie Simpson who spoke with me, prayed with me and led me to Christ. And amongst those from whom I learned the significance of hospitality, and I mean welcome into heart as well as home, was Nettie Simpson.
Down through the years of responding to God's call to ministry, my training, and my ordination and induction to my first church in Partick, Mr and Mrs Simpson (I never called either of them by their first names when I spoke with them- then or till now) they were supportive, encouraging and wise guides.When in 1979 Charlie died suddenly, aged 56, I conducted his funeral service, and we have remained close friends of Nettie all these years. Amongst my treasures are some of Charlie's books, including most of my P T Forsyth collection – something else I owe to these two wonderful people.
And so on Tuesday I will conduct Mrs Simpson's funeral, for me an act of gratitude, love and admiration, as well as pastoral care and support for her family. Nettie's time as a minister's wife coincided with a time of narrow exclusiveness in relation to the ministry of women in our churches in Scotland. But I would want to say that the two of them were God's gift to the church, and their ministry of spiritual nurture, open hospitality and willingly borne inconvenience, gave me time and space to grow into the reality of the decision I made. And I have never thought of them as anything other than ministers of God, whose love and understanding made the grace of God credible to me.
How can we ever second guess God? Or know where the road of our life together takes unexpected turns? That night, in a small vestry, on my knees, saying yes to Jesus and to a different future. And beside me the man who was my first spiritual director, and the one who baptised me – and in due course, this young upstart would become a minister, and take the funeral service for him, and thirty years later for his wife. I look on these two people as amongst those whose faith in me has give substance and reality to what I believe about the generous and persistent love of God, who believes in us and redeems us to the depths of our being.
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.