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The Blessing of Brief Encounters with Lonely People.

Sitting on a bench looking at this yesterday.

An old local worthy stopped by, accompanied by one of those joyous dogs, a brown cross Springer spaniel and Border collie.

In ten minutes he spoke of a life in the merchant navy, on a fishing trawler where he went overboard and barely survived, his loneliness and at times overwhelming sadness following his wife's death some years ago, his dog's liking for burns, culverts, puddles and other places to get filthy, his skirmishes with the Council about their various shortcomings in keeping the beach clean.

Came away glad he had stopped to speak, and pleased to have listened to those parts of his story he felt able to tell to two strangers.

31 March 2023
Praying for Our Country to “Act Justly, Love Mercy and Walk Humbly before God.”

I've just listened to today's full Statement to the House of Commons by the Immigration Secretary Robert Jenrick, and to an hour of the subsequent debate. The Statement set out Govt plans to create several more large bases to accommodate "illegal migrants" who have arrived via "small boats."

The blanket phrase "illegal migrants" recurred with almost liturgical import throughout the 7 minute speech. He was concerned about those who "abuse our generosity", and the "eye-watering cost" of hotel accommodation which would "act like a magnet to millions of people displaced and seeking better economic prospects."

Repeatedly he pitched the plight of those arriving on small boats against "the British people", emphasising the "cost to the hard-working British tax-payer", the "security concerns" the need to act in the national interests and "fundamentally alter the posture towards illegal migrants."

At no stage was there the slightest acknowledgement that the word illegal has no relevance to people seeking asylum and refugees. His tone in both the Statement and his responses was divisive and as good a demonstration of "othering" vulnerable people, as much else that is being spoken by Government ministers, all the way up to and including the Prime Minister.

He wants to stop "illegal migrants from breaking into our country". In reply to the response from the Shadow Home Secretary, “They would make the United Kingdom a magnet, there would be open doors, an open cheque book, and there would be open season for abuse.”

I came away from an hour of this wondering about the future of a country exposed day and daily to rhetoric that dehumanises, lacks the cogency of compassion, and is fuelled by anger and self-righteous claims about "standing up for the British people. A deliberate rhetorical strategy which chooses words carefully for their push-button effect on some of our most negative feelings towards those we are being encouraged to fear, resent and "other".

And as a Christian and a citizen, a tax-payer and one of those Mr Jenrick claims to be speaking for, I challenge the arguments he uses, and reject the discourse of division, and refuse to have my ethics so badly misrepresented.

Over the past 18 months, I and others in our church community have had much to do with numbers of people seeking asylum and housed in a hotel a few minutes walk from our church. I've listened to stories, looked at photographs, struggled over language barriers, talked of separated family, shared coffee and companionship, tried to find ways of making life less bleak and more hopeful. These are human beings, with inherent worth and a right to live without fear, people with hopes and gifts, deserving of at least a hearing, and until then, treatment under-written with dignity and respect.

I refuse to sign up to the language of "othering", the rhetoric of resentment, and policies aimed at making life harder for people already vulnerable. "He has shown us, every human one of us, what He requires: to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God." Aye, that.

29 March 2023
Lent with R. S. Thomas: “the opposite of poetry is not prose, but science.”

You could be forgiven for thinking that R S THomas was a Luddite, a hater of technology and the mechanisation of life. The machine is manufactured, and Thomas was deeply fearful of what "man" "makes" in factories, what machines do to the land and to the human soul.

Many of his poems are ambivalent about science, even more uncertain about technology, fearful and mistrusting of human knowledge applied for the purposes of mastering nature by machinery and mechanisation, rather than serving creation by care and stewardship. He had lived through the years of war, of the tractor replacing the horse, the combine harvester devouring fields in half a day that would have taken men a week with scythes, twine, forks and sheaves, and further days of toil at the threshing mill.

His deeper fears focused on human applications of physics, the creation of the atomic bomb, the deploying, as threat, of nuclear weapons capable of destroying human life and earth as a viable home. Picking mushrooms reminded him of the mushroom cloud, and the white domes of early warning systems.

The laboratory was a place where power and domination were exercised over matter, so that the same power could be exercised over other people, peoples and nations. Like George MacLeod, Thomas had no hesitation in seeing the splitting of the atom, and nuclear fission, harnessed to military ends, as blasphemy, the turning of the fundaments of life to the ends of mass death.

The opposite of poetry is not prose, says Thomas quoting Coleridge, it's science. Jesus was a poet, he argued, implying much that we are left to ponder. "Jesus was a poet, and would have teased the scientists, as he teased Nathanael". Nathanael was the disciple 'in whom there was no guile', sitting under the fig tree, whether thinking, praying, waiting. (John 1.43-51) But the allusion to Nathanael and his waiting under the tree provides Thomas's entry point for one of his ironic and apologetic critiques of the scientific enterprise, the technological mentality, the mechanistic worldview.

His quarrel wasn't with science, but with science as dominance, technology as efficiency, lust for knowledge unrestrained by humility. His late poem on the theme of science as both wrong question and wrong answer shows he is not an obscurantist opposed to science, discovery and learning. The poem considers the futility of science as an explanation of ultimate concerns (he was in well-read dialogue with Paul Tillich). Science and technology are not of themselves a sufficient basis for human flourishing, and are not to be trusted as guarantors of a human future. This from The Echoes Return Slow:

*

"Because Coleridge had said that the opposite of poetry was not prose but science, that was what he preached from the pulpit at times, his eye straying through the leaded window to the sea outside that passed and remained always. He defended himself with the fact that Jesus was a poet, and would have teased the scientists as he teased Nathanael."

*

I have waited for him
              under the tree of science
and he has not come:

            and no voice has said:
Behold a scientist in whom
            there is no guile

I have put my hand in my pocket
                for a penny for the engaging
of the machinery of things and
                it was a bent
penny, fit for nothing but for placing
                on the cobbled eyeballs
of the dead.

                 And where do I go
                 from here? I have looked in
through the windows of their glass
                 laboratories and seen them plotting
the future, and have put a cross
                 there at the bottom
of the working out of their problems to
                 prove to them that they were wrong.¹

"I have…put a cross…" At the centre of Christian faith is a truth beyond the powers of science to explain or even explore. The cross is a symbol of all that is wrong with the world; how can the answers be right if all the workings and working out are based from the start on false premises, incomplete data, and skewed purposes. The cross is also a symbol of all that is right, at least insofar as the Cross is God's way of confronting the self destructive impulses that go back to the beginning when under another tree, the knowledge of good and evil was filched from God.

This is a poem that absolutely requires biblical literacy to be able to hear the potent theological and biblical sub-texts. As a Lenten poem it could be a call for us to adopt a far less sanguine view of human technological ingenuity, as in its rapid advances it outstrips our moral maturity and wisdom. And in place of intellectual hubris, a Cross, that symbol of the marker that something is so wrong in the conclusion, that the questions and answers require deeper and better thought.

1. R. S. Thomas. Collected Later Poems, Bloodaxe, 2004, page 56.

29 March 2023
Wild Geese and the Restless Longing of the Heart

It was 7.30 in the morning, over 30 years ago, when Dorothy rung my doorbell. She was dressed as always, immaculate hair, mohair cardigan, blue chiffon scarf and her favourite brightly coloured long skirt. She tugged my arm, urged me to come outside and look up. And there flying over the West End of Aberdeen, against a frost blue sky, a long skein of geese, honking their way north. “Would it not be fine to be able to do that” she asked, her eyes bright with the thought of such wild freedom. I hope I’m as alive as her when I start pushing eighty!

The wild goose is a Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit, expressing the freedom and urgency of God, and the homing instinct of the human heart. “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in You”, said Saint Augustine. His words, a millennium and half later, still speak to the restlessness and God embarrassment of people not sure what we want, but full of wanting.

The American poet, Mary Oliver understood the frustration and desire that give our hearts colour, edge and the rich texture of emotional and spiritual longing. Her poem 'Wild Geese' ends like this:

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

About that restlessness, Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life, life in all its fullness.” Two thousand years later Jesus still dares us to take flight, and fly, and live, and find our home in God.

28 March 2023
A Poem from a Bookshelf.

Just for fun I rearranged some book titles on one of my bookshelves. The picture is a woodcut of The Annunciuation, with Mary studying and being interrupted!

A Poem from a Bookshelf.

The Humility of the Eternal Son

Space, Time and Incarnation

God the Revealed

The Go-Between God

Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense

Divine Humanity

Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity

The Creative Suffering of God

Christ the Key

Fountain of Salvation

Saved by Faith and Hospitality

27 March 2023
Thought for Each Day This Week: “the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.”

Monday

I John 2.7-8 “Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.”

An old apostle, remembering a long time ago, a new commandment spoken by Jesus, “that you love one another as I have loved you.” It’s old, but it’s renewed every time we obey it. This letter has more about the love of God, and our love for each other than anywhere else in the New Testament. Love isn’t an option; it’s a command. Get on with it!

Tuesday

1 John 2.9 “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother or sister lives in the light and there is nothing in them to make them stumble.

Light and darkness, love and hate. In this one area of human relationships there is black and white. To hate is to live in darkness; to love is to live in the light. Every time we act or speak in love “the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.

Wednesday

1 John 2.15 “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.”

“The world” in John’s thought isn’t the created world. It’s that way of ordering life in opposition to God. When we make idols of money and possessions, crave for power, live selfishly and competitively. The world is human life organised without reference to God. If we love a world with no time for God, it’s hard to claim we love God. All that the world tries to possess will pass away; doing God’s will has no sell by date.

Thursday

1 John 2.20-21 “But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth.”

Every believer is anointed by God, set apart for holiness, truth and love. John is urging his people to have confidence in God’s touch on their lives. God is true, and Jesus is the truth. We know it and we know him, and so we live by the truth that sets us free and enables us to see clearly the light and love of God.

Friday

1 John 2.24-25 “As for you, see that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father. And this is what he promised us—eternal life.”

That word ‘remains’. Another of John’s favourites. It means to abide, to stay, to dwell and make your home. Abide in Christ, make your home in the fellowship of the father and the Son through the Spirit. Eternal life is to share the life of God. Paul’s way of saying this is that we are in Christ, and Christ lives in us. A life of fellowship of fellowship with God is heaven!

Saturday

1 John 2.28 “And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.”

Stay in Christ, right where you are. Continue in trust, love, prayer and service. In other words, keep going. When it’s tough don’t give up. When tempted don’t give in. The truth of the gospel, the anointing of the Holy Spirit, love for the Father, walking in the light, loving our brothers and sisters, trust and confidence in Christ – stick with these and you will not be ashamed to meet the Lord when he returns is glory.

Sunday

1 John 2.29 “If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him.”

As Christians we are known by how we think, speak and act. Righteousness describes a life in which truth, light, love and faith are obvious. The life we live is so transparent that others can see right through us and se Christ. We are God’s children, says John: so act like it. God is Love, so love as you have been loved by God. God is Light, so shine with the brilliance of the Light of the world.

…………….

May the mind of Christ, my Saviour, live in me from day to day,
by his love and power controlling all I do and say.

May the word of God dwell richly in my heart from hour to hour,
so that all may see I triumph only through his power.

27 March 2023
Moderating the Discourse of Large Organisations With Power Over the Welfare of Others.

I remember in the early 1980's, the only time I ever invigilated O levels. The subject was metalwork; the noise was excruciating with 20 pupils wielded hammers, hack saws, and metal files as they produced the required right angle brackets.

The teacher who had to stay outside the class was pleading for some latitude in the time part of the test, referring to some in the class as "wee inadequates." At the time I thought it was what we might call inappropriate stereotyping – nowadays it would be considered a much more serious breach, discriminatory and even derogatory.

So why on earth is it acceptable for Ofsted to use a one word summary of a school as "inadequate"? And that without further qualification. I know the gradings are shorthand. But that in itself is a concession to the brutalisation of public discourse and organisational evaluative terminology.

The word now is that the one word bottom line will be reviewed. Two very important considerations have to be balanced:

1. The concerns and responsibilities of Ofsted who:

Provide independent, up-to-date evaluations on the quality of education, safeguarding and leadership, which parents greatly rely on to give them confidence in choosing the right school for their child." (Dept. of Education)

2. The wellbeing and welfare of School, Staff.

"Many head teachers are getting 'very ill, stressed and having breakdowns' as a result of inspections and 'that's not acceptable under any framework'. Ms Price-Grimshaw, who used to be an Ofsted inspector, said it was "impossible for teachers and head teachers to raise standards if they're feeling broken, demoralised, stressed and anxious". (Julie Price-Grimshaw, School Improvement Adviser).

Those responsible for enhancing the quality of education are obliged, by their own educational claims of excellence, to take a lead in creating a culture of co-operative and supportive collaboration in the evaluative process. That starts by ensuring the language used in final reports values, respects, supports, enables and empowers school leaders and teachers.

Ofsted are given significant powers to do their job well. The job is not done well when those powers crush instead of nurture the very people who can implement recommendations for improvement. Or so it seems to me.

The back story to this can be found here, on the BBC website

24 March 2023
Lent with R. S. Thomas: When Our Prayers Keep God Awake, Now and Forever, Amen.

Minerva's bird, Athene noctua: too small for wisdom, yet unlike it's tawnier cousin active by day, too, its cat's eyes bitterer than the gorse petals. But at night it was lyrical, its double note sounded under the stars in counterpoint to the fall of the waves.

*

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

(R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems, Bloodaxe 2004. p. 51)

What happens when we pray? What happens to us when we pray? But Thomas explores a more unsettling question: What happens to God when we pray? If prayer is indeed relationship, what kind of relationship can it be? Who is this "Other" that we dare to trouble with our words and thoughts and desires and fears?

In the stillness of the night there are the noises of the natural world, and hearing has the heightened sensitivity of solitude and the otherwise silent nightscape. Silent except for the two tone cry of the little owl,¹ the bird of prey hunting in the darkness, seeing but unseen, dangerously silent; and the bark of the fox, its yelp having the right frequency to carry from distance.

And that other sound so resonant for Thomas, the swell of the waves which originates in oceanic depths beyond imagining, but which then rise and fall and finally break "on the long shore / by the village that is without light / and companionless." To be "without light and companionless" is a self-description of the priest awake in the small hours; it glints with lucid honesty, distilling into ordinary images and experiences a theologia negativa. But companionless is not the final word, nor is it's time-bound duration assumed to have ultimate permanence. Because there is an other Being, who like the long shore allows our prayers to break on him, and not for the limited duration of a tide in ebb and flow, but forever.

Thomas is probing a theological axiom of the impassibility and immutability of God. He is imagining what it must mean that human prayers come from a swell in the deep oceans of humanity in extremis, and they rise and fall, rise and fall, wave on wave, on the long shore of God, not for a few hours but for eternity. Written like that, in prosaic clauses Thomas's speculative theology is startling enough.

But written in the cadences of this poem, those closing lines evoke that strangest of responses, our sympathy for God, who is awake in the night hours, receiving into the reality of who God is, endless waves of human longing, rising and falling, originating in those Atlantic depths of existence beyond human telling, where hope and despair, love and loss, comfort and terror become waves which break on the shoreline of God's eternity.

"There are nights that are so still…". Psalm 121 is a night Psalm, and has a similar image: "He who guards Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." But Thomas has taken that affirmative confident confession of faith to a different level of meaning. This "Other" is, like Thomas himself, unable to sleep; or perhaps unwilling, because letting "our prayers break on him", allowing human longing, desire and need to matter.

Then there are these words, written by P. T. Forsyth,² another pastor theologian impatient with lazy thought and easy answers : "God has old prayers of yours maturing by him…we shall come one day to a heaven where we shall gratefully know that God's great refusals were sometimes the truest answers to our truest prayer. Our soul is fulfilled if our petition is not."³ I think Thomas might have raised an eyebrow at such spiritual confidence, perhaps because Forsyth had pushed too far in imagination into the mind of God, and beyond the mystery of prayers apparently unanswered.

That in turn may be because as well as having a reputation as one of the best read British theologians in contemporary German theology and philosophy, Forsyth was also a deep reader of the Puritan Thomas Goodwin. In one of his treatises, Goodwin has a passage in which he likens God's faithfulness in answering prayer to the conscientious correspondent who keeps his friend's letters in a conspicuous place until they are answered. Forsyth interpreted the silence of God as neither absence nor indifference to those waves of prayer, but as the wise intentions of love, requiring patience and trust while acknowledging the frustrations of delayed response .

Thomas refuses such comforting analogies. The two note call of the little owl, the bark of the fox from miles away, imitate the heart hunger of the human lying awake in restless longing. And as counterpoint, the poem finishes with a cyclic climax.God's willing enduring of wave upon wave of prayers is not for hours, or days, but for eternity. Love is eternally vigilant, eternally enduring, eternally willing to bear the prayers of a broken creation. The rhythms of prayer and the waves of grace coincide, and break on the shores of eternity and upon the heart of "that other being, too…"

1. The photo of the little owl in flight is from the website Bird Spot. https://www.birdspot.co.uk/bird-identification/little-owl The photo of the sea was taken at Aberdeen beach beside the breakwaters on a winter morning!

2. P. T. Forsyth was a polymath, fully immersed in contemporary intellectual and artistic culture. Born in Aberdeen in 1848. he became Principal of the Congregational College in London. His writings form a remarkable corpus of passionate theology written with urgency to the church of his day always circling round his core conviction that God is holy love.

3. P. T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer. Independent Press, 1949, p.67, 14.

24 March 2023
The Rose Window and the Cross

Sitting amongst friends from Iran, who are seeking asylum; talking within the limits of two very different languages; laughter, smiles, fist-bumps, tea and home baking, forms of non verbal fellowship; and up there, the rose window, and beneath it the cross.

What brings us together is a common humanity, a gathering beneath a cross and a window made beautiful by light.

Light and life and love, discovered in hospitality and a welcome that begins in the heart and reaches out in imagination, generosity, and promised companionship for the journey.

"Brother, sister, let me serve you,

let me be as Christ to you:

pray that I may have the grace to

let me be your servant too."

22 March 2023
Lent with R. S. Thomas: “The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth’s castle.”

Perhaps no other experience exposes more effectively the limitations and occasional pretensions of the relatively new academic discipline of practical theology, than the vocational routines of those called to pastoral care, priestly prayer, and the self-giving of daily life in the service of those all too human communities we call the church.

Thus, I think, R. S. Thomas, who might have been a very difficult student if asked to regard his pastoral encounters as qualitative research using an hermeneutic phenomenology à la Habermas! For, despite all his metaphysical hesitations and theological complaints, his disillusions with ecclesial institution and recurring disappointments with his own fittingness to be a priest, Thomas the priest-poet sometimes nailed it.

Nailed it! I dislike that contemporary cliché if only on aesthetic lines, especially in a culture more used to mass produced plastic disposables than hand made steel pitons. But in this case I think even Thomas would approve the image – perhaps because when a Christian uses the verb 'to nail', we unwittingly give ourselves a painful mnemonic nudge to look towards the Cross.¹ And Thomas was, whatever else we might call him, a theologian of the cross and a despiser therefore of all theologies of glory.

His prose-poem account of how he spent his earlier days as a priest in remote and hard to find corners of Wales is enlightening for those who wonder about the relevance of theology, the worthwhileness of thinking, the value of study, and the struggle to read, think and pray, that is the soil out of which pastoral care grows to human fruitfulness.

"A priest's work is not all stewardship, pastoralia. In a rural parish the time for that is the evening, when the farmer nods over the fire. In the morning, the mind fresh, there is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind. The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth's castle. He did not take it by storm. He was as often repulsed as he pretended to have gained ground. And yet…"²

I'm not sure I know a better apologia for a discipleship of the intellect, the summons to love God with the mind, the determined duty of thinking as a way of obedience to the God who nevertheless will not be discovered by our cleverness, uncovered by our investigations and interrogations, reduced or categorised by our constructed concepts, or held captive by semantic precision.

"And yet…" Those last two words represent hope pointing beyond ellipsis to the promise that truth is its own value. And the One who calls us to curiosity and contemplation, to reverent thought and humble study, is the One who meets us time and again at the brook Jabbok and wrestles with us until we are again exhausted and only partially enlightened; "And yet…", we go limping towards the dawn.

"There is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind." This is in no way intended as a slight to the farmer. Rather it is an explanation to the priest, and a warning, not to expect farmers to understand that time in the study is also a time of ploughing, of seed sowing, of fruitfulness and harvest, a time for ideas to germinate, take root and grow.

"The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth's castle." Irony? Apologia? I think neither. More an acknowledgement that though working different fields, priest and farmer labour towards a shared goal of sustained human life in the daily round.

And there is in this prose poem a hint that the farmer's struggling with the elements of rain and wind, frost and sunshine, and the uncertainties of harvest and the worry about making ends meet, these have their equivalent in the study, and in the ploughing and harrowing of ideas. "And yet…"; yes, there is too, in study as in field, the hope of fruitfulness come autumn.

1.The image is a detail from one of my own tapestries, "Bright Wings". It is based around the Hebrew script of Tikkun Olam, "to repair the world', and on the poem 'God's Grandeur' by Hopkins.

2. The Echoes Return Slow, MacMillan, 1988, page 32; and in Collected Later Poems, Bloodaxe, page 27. The Echoes Return Slow is one of my favourite volumes, and the first one I read and re-read 35 years ago now. This was the collection that drew me in.

21 March 2023