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       The Avowal

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

This poem was written for two of Levertov's friends, in remembrance of time spent together in 1983 celebrating the birthday of George Herbert. In the years following this poem Levertov gradually moved towards Christian faith, tentative, exploratory, with that mixture of reluctance and yearning that is the creative tension and energy of such personal commitment.

This poem is early in Levertov's conversion process, but already she recognises the risk that must be taken, not so much the leap of faith as the surrender of control to that which bears and sustains the soul so that it floats and does not fall, but is held. The poet recognises that faith in God requires a letting go, a relinquishing of that self-determination that can be so self-protective we never learn to swim in deep water or fly in the shadow of mountains.

She is still searching for a view of God adequate to her longing, just as she searches for words to articulate where that longing comes from and where it will ultimately take her. What she does know, and will retain throughout the rest of her life is that she is created, loved and surrounded by goodness, mercy, acceptance, the embrace of grace.

Interestingly she had bought a copy of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love for her niece the same year this poem was written. The cosmic optimism and personal hopefulness of this short poem has spiritual affinities with Julian, but as yet lacks the Christological vision of the crucified Christ as the source and demonstration of that embrace, that all surrounding grace. One of Julians's recurring  phrases is "enfolded in love"; and likewise one of Julian's more daring theological reflections, is her vision of the motherliness of Christ's love.

Knowing no effort earns that all surrounding grace is a remarkable paraphrase of the Apostle Paul; "By grace you are saved, and that not of yourself, it is the gift of God." I doubt if we ever reach a stage when those words lose their power to contradict our pride, heal our anxious performance-oriented devotions, renew with a different energy our frantic, or complacent walking in the footsteps of Jesus. Levertov reminds us that's as it should be. For the gift of God is the gift of God himself, promised presence, sufficient grace, love incognito, the goodness and mercy that follows us, with patience and hopefulness, bearing us up when otherwise we would fall.

Denise Levertov's images of floating and soaring, of being borne by power outside ourselves, expresses the reality of a life thus borne up, a call to take the risk of trust, and perhaps also to the trusting of risk as the only way to swim and fly. Faith is a dare, a personal surrender to the grace that is all surrounding, but becomes personal in the embrace of the one who creates and gives life.

A year after this poem was written, while still exploring what Christian commitment might mean for her, she wrote an essay that closes with these words:

It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty [Imagination] that one moves towards faith. Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says,'God and the imagination are one', I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God." (A Poet's View.)

That is the prose context for her poem 'The Avowal', a title which means "an affirmation of the truth of what you believe." The poet imagines floating looking skywards, and flying looking earthwards. "So I would learn to attain freefall…" That word too, is carefully chosen by a poet precise with words and awake to theological nuance. Freefall is when no external force influences flight other than gravity, and the gravity of the Creator Spirit pulls towards deep embrace and all-surrounding grace. This poem is a deep footprint on Levertov's path that would eventually lead to her conversion, and her own personal act of surrender to God as revealed in Jesus Christ.     

Suspended

I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.

Denise Levertov "fulfills the eternal mission of the true Poet; to be a receptacle of Divine Grace and a 'spender of that Grace to humanity'". The words are from a review of one of Levertov's 24 volumes of poems. This slim collection of 38 poems gathers some of her more significantly religious poems. Her purpose in doing so was as a convenience to her readers "who are themselves concerned with doubt and faith. 

The Stream and the Sapphire attempts " to some extent, to trace my slow movement from  agnosticism to Christian faith, a movement incorporating much of doubt and questioning as well as affirmation." What you hear in Levertov's poems on religious themes is an honest voice, hopeful rather than confident, faith in the interrogative mood, but with a substructure of thanksgiving and hopefulness evoking trust. 

I first came across her in her collection of essays, The Poet in the World. She is nothing like as well known here as she is in North America, but those who hear her distinctive voice realise they are listening to someone who takes both poetry and life with utmost seriousness. In the title essay, 'The Poet in the World', she says,

"The interaction of life on art and of art on life is continuous. Poetry is necessary to a whole man, and that poetry be not divided from the rest of life is necessary to it. Both life and poetry fade, wilt, shrink, when they are divorced."

Poetry is vocation, a summons to truthfulness, a call to give voice to the mountain ranges and ocean depths and open skies of human experience. With that calling comes the responsibility to say what is seen, to hear what is said, and to interpret the world to the mind, the heart, the imagination and the conscience. And Levertov had no doubt conscience was crucial to poetry claiming to speak into human realities. She became a conscience-guided poet, a vocal protester and practitioner of social conscience and moral discernment in the world of politics, economics and scientific technology.

Her stance affected her popularity and drew criticism from the community of poets. Many of her poems were overtly and unabashedly political; the Vietnam war, covert American subversive activity in Central America, the nuclear arms race, war and militarism and the suffering of both soldiers and civilians in technologically efficient and morally indifferent warfare. Even before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Levertov was a passionate advocate for environmental care and proper curation of the earth's ecology. All these issues become recurring themes throughout her fifty years of published work and public speaking. Levertov quotes with warm approval, "Literature is dynamite because it asks – proposes – moral questions  and seeks to define the nature and worth of human life."

Such a colourful background of social activism and engagement with peace and justice issues make this small anthology an intriguing account of her spiritual experience. So much moral outrage, political courage and protest put into powerful words. She produced a stream of ethical reflection and publicly spoken uneasiness with the status quo. Such engagement and responsiveness to the world created various strands of inner experience in process of being woven into a spirit that, at the right time, found a new and renewing depth in her discovery of the reality of God.

This is the last in this series about thin books. But it leads into the next week's writing, when I'll try to commend and comment on one of Levertov's poems, mainly from her own chose anthology. 

Her poem, 'Suspended', printed above, has long been an important port of call for me when either life has come clattering down and around me, or I have struggled to hold on to whatever it is that faith is. I know it by heart. When our daughter Aileen died, I remember times of reciting, or reading this poem, and thanking God for the truth of its last line.

I have no idea what a poet thinks they are doing when they write a poem and send it out into the world. How can they even imagine what words can do if they come at the right time, and are the right words? It's a mystery, and one that is made to feel all the deeper when the poet's words come as a word from that mysterious mercy that enables us to say, "I have not plummeted." 

 

Now and again, like every other reader, I wonder, "Why did I ever buy this book?" But, until online book buying gobbled up so much of the book market, only a very few times have I ever wondered where I bought this, or that book. Then there are those books you remember exactly when and where you bought it, and why. This book is one of them.

On holiday in New England, visiting very special friends Bob and Rebecca, in the Hanover Book Store, in the early 1990's, I bought Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict. Insights for the Ages. For a good few years I had been studying Benedictine and Cisterician spirituality. During Lent in 1984, at a time in my life when more was happening than was easy to manage and process, I worked through Seeking God. The Way of St Benedict by Esther De Waal. It was a book that considerably re-shaped my inner life, made me re-think the disciplines of obedient Christian living, and provided a new framework within which to practice ministry as care and commitment to community. 

For several years after that I subscribed to Cistercian Studies, a quarterly academic journal on monastic spirituality with many articles on prayer, contemplative spirituality, and community formation. On occasion, I corresponded with a Trappist Brother who was one of the editors, and who had come across my name from an article in the Expository Times. He first wrote to me because he was intrigued to know why a Scottish Baptist minister was interested in a tradition so different from my own. I was quite intrigued myself! 

Back to Sister Joan Chittister OSB, and her commentary on The Rule of Benedict. The first thing to say about reading this book is the immediate impression we are listening to a no nonsense counsellor who knows her own heart well, and who understands other hearts and minds. She is compassionate, funny, sharp as a pin, instinctively alert to the subterfuges and excuses we all make for our outward behaviour and inner dispositions. By leading the reader carefully through the text of the Rule she invites us to be honest about ourselves, to look in the mirror and see what is there, and not hate it. The Rule is a journey towards wholeness which is found in obedience to Scripture, simplicity of life, stability of standpoint, commitment to community, prayer as openness to God, to our community and to the world. 

This book integrated much of my previous reading, thinking and praying about what a Christian life could look like if energised by a disciplined freedom for ourselves, and a commitment of love and service to the other. In the years since, Chittister has become a figure of international importance as a spiritual writer, peace activist and campaigner for social justice, equality and human flourishing. Of her many books I've read a few, but this one remains the most familiar as a source of spiritual commonsense, incisive directness, good humoured patience with human failing, and constant hopefulness for what human life can be when touched into fullness by learning to love the God who loves us first, and last.

Here is Chittister on the Rule practised in the obedient life of community:

"These tools of the spiritual life – justice, peacemaking, respect for all creation, trust in God – are the work of a lifetime. Each one of them represents the unearthed jewel that is left in us to mine."

"Life is a tapestry woven daily from yesterday's threads. The colours don't change, only the shapes we give them."

"God does not want people in positions simply to get a job done. He wants people in positions who embody why we bother to do the job at all. He wants holy listeners who care about the effect of what they do on everybody else." 

"When we make ourselves God, no one oin the world is safe in our presence….Eventually the thought of humility is rejected out of hand, and we have been left as a civilisation  to stew in the consequences of our own arrogance."

"When we refuse to give place to others, when we consume all the space of our worlds with our own sounds and our own trusths and our own wisdom and our own ideas, there is no room for anyone else's ideas…the ego becomes a majority of one and there is no one left from whom to learn." 

My copy is so old and used the glue has dried and split. I go back to it often, especially to the pencil marked margins. There is a section on humility and leadership that was written thirty years ago, and which describes with devastating prescience, what moral failings of political leadership lacking in humility, truthfulness, accountability and integrity. Strange, that a Rule intended to create stability, sanctity and service in monastic communities, should speak with such psychological precision into the stress fractures that threaten our own culture's future capacity to renew itself. 

Some books are for their time. This book is now dated in important ways. Chittister would write a different book today. I suspect it would be more outspoken, more angry at injustice, more resistant to the moral laziness and spiritual lethargy of personal piety and self-cultivation. She is now a loud voice in prison and penal reform; she is utterly fearless in calling out the ways culture and church dis-empower women; she is much more impatient with recalcitrant unjust structures and systems of her own church and wider society, that make change difficult and preserve the privileges of the wealthy, the powerful and the loudest voices. Having read both women, Joan Chittister now reads like the spiritual adviser of Madeleine Albright! 

So it may be you would be best going for one of her more recent books. Her latest book, The Time is Now, is a passionate constructive critique of the current crisis of truth in the United States. Between the Dark and the Daylight. Embracing the Contradictions of Life, is an exploration of the ways life can become murky, lose focus and pull us in different directions. Then there's Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, a quite startling exposition of Jacob at Peniel, and one that has grown out of someone who gets it, the legacy and even healing potential of scars and wounds. All I would say is, if you haven't read Joan Chittister, an important voice is missing from the conversations of your life.       

Today has been a busy day of writing to and for other people.

Several emails to people facing surgery, having had difficult news, struggling with loneliness, anxious for family or friends. The usual pastoral response would involve presence, visiting, conversation, prayer. Some of that can be written, but much of what we convey in pastoral care is embodied and the body has its own language. Whatever benefits can be found in online encounters, they cannot substitute for the touch of hand on hand, the smile of understanding, the awareness of a physical presence that says we are not on our own. 

A pastoral letter to our church community. No, not the "As I sit in my study watching the daffodils wafting lazily in the gentle breeze" kind of letter, the literary and spiritual equivalent of artificially sweetened dream topping. Rather. Reflection on how we practise hospitality in a time of social distancing, isolation and lock down; find ways of being there for, if you cannot be there with. Then some thoughts on prayer as what the church does alongside everything else. Prayer, not as add on, but as essential source of energy, imagination and compassion. Prayer is not only what the church does; it demonstrates what the church is, – a priestly community open to the world, open to God, and facilitating the connectedness between the grace of heaven and the need of earth.

Then producing a week's Thought for the Day, seven verses from the Bible, each with no more than 70 words of comment, but earthed in the reality of our life together as a community of faith and belonging. Something to think about, words to guide and encourage, a catalyst to change the way the day looks.  

Then the phone calls. To people self-isolating and feeling the long loneliness of another 3 weeks looming, and beyond that. To someone heading for surgery soon and anxious about going anywhere near a hospital just now. To couples where one is shielding the other, and so far it's all going fine and food, medicine and exercise are all working out. From someone checking up on us and taking time to listen as well as speak. From my oldest friend, out for his exercise walk and decided he needed to find out how we are doing, and our promise that as soon as this is over we meet half way between here and Glasgow and have a bacon roll and coffee.

Aye, that kind of day. A privilege kind of day. One of those days when you give what you can and trust it's enough. A bit like the boy with his loaves and fish; the results are the same whatever we put into the Master's hands.

This time I'm going to break my own rules. That's because those who read Walter Brueggemann know that he is the author very many thickly textured thin books. Indeed I suspect the phrase "thickly textured" comes from my reading of Brueggemann from his first books till now, and that, like the twelfth of never, is a long, long time. So I want to mention several of Brueggemann's books, and those reading this, well you can take your pick. 

By way of orientation for those who don't know about him. From his appointment as Professor of Old Testament at Eden Theological Seminary in 191, until his retirement from Columbia Theological seminary in 2003, and still active in scholarship and preaching at the age of 88, Walter Brueggemann has written, preached, taught, lectured and served the church all his life. He remained in Seminary education in order to influence the formation of those who would serve the church as preachers and pastors. It mattered to him what theological and pastoral students do with their studying and their thinking. He wanted to encourage them to become people of prayer, scholars for whom study and contemplation in the world of the biblical text would provide the nourishment and guidance for the people of God in a time of cultural exile and globalised capitalism.

I'm not sure who actually knows how many books Walter Brueggemann has written. According to his own website the total at present stands at 137 – that is not a misprint. There are three scheduled for 2020, but in fact the list omits Virus as a Summons to Faith. Biblical Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief and Uncertainty, just published. The title and subtitle say much about why Brueggemann has become for many pastors and Christ followers a trusted source of biblical wisdom, pastoral responsiveness, and theological responsibility when dealing with the dilemmas, suffering and injustices of life in our globalised world. You can find more about Brueggemann on his website. For now, some reasons why he has a place in this series of blog posts.

Living Toward a Vision. Biblical reflections on Shalom. (1976.Rev Ed.82). Ever since reading this book 'shalom' has been a keyword in my world view. The word incorporates blessing as wide as the grace and generosity of God. Living towards shalom means deep commitments to peace as a gift and a task; it involves compassion enough to be inconvenienced and generous to those in need; it requires imagination to think newness into old unjust systems of power, in order to transform our social arrangements towards human flourishing; shalom invites change and incites the passions to work for them. And that's Brueggemann just getting started. For me this was a ministry defining book that compels an out of the ordinary kind of obedience, a new way of seeing the world differently, trusting the graced interventions of God through gifts to God's people, and then the people of God heeding the vision and wirlding God's gifts of shalom, serving God to make it so.

Which brings me to The Prophetic Imagination (1978). "The time may be ripe in the church for serious consideration of prophecy as a crucial element in ministry." "The prophets", he argued, "understood the distinctive power of language, the capacity to speak in ways that evoke newness "fresh from the word."  This book introduced to its readers the distinctive themes and tones of Brueggemann's ministry of scholarship: the role of an alternative community with different goals for human community; creating a mindset that is counter cultural in order to be a creative and redemptive presence in that culture; acknowledgement of pain and suffering, openness to human pathos and enough faith in God to voice lament and anger arising out of grief; the prophet's words and visions a energy source of faith, amazement and risk in the reach for newness. Few writers enter more deeply into the biblical text in search of God rather than answers to human crises.

The Message of the Psalms is an astonishing book. In it Brueggemann expounds the Book of Psalms using a 'scheme' of orientation – disorientation – reorientation. Some Psalms are entirely positive, affirming creation and the Creator, extolling the blessings of Torah, celebrating occasions of well-being, life is experienced as orientation towards blessing. Other Psalms are much more negative, as tragedy and suffering bring anguish and deep questioning of faith, there is disorientation, and as deep penitence is called for, despair is given voice in some of the most pain filled words in all of world literature. Yet other Psalms speak of reorientation, praise and gratitude for reconciliation, problem resolution and restored relationships, a return to thanksgiving as a default disposition of faith, returning confidence in God and in life in one's place in the world and in the divine purposes. Throughout the book Brueggemann comments briefly, sharply and at times quite brilliantly about the human experiences of orientation – disorientation – reorientation as a cycle of life circumstances that give rise to such apt and to the point prayers as are gathered in the Psalter.

Those who have read Brueggemann over the years would now recognise his voice, his way of saying things, and the remarkable power of his own words. Who else writes like this:

"The subversion of faith has nothing to do with being liberal or conservative. It has to do rather with this question: whether the dominant force of technological, electronic, military consumerism is to have the final say in the world, whether the practices of greed, alienation, despair, amnesia and brutality are to be the shape of the world in which only the privileged have a chance to live well, and that by utilization of the deprivileged as a means toward ends. Or whether the covenantal dreams of Moses, the deep hopes of Jeremiah, and the suffering transformative love of Jesus will draw us to an alternative faith that treasures our common, God-given humanness."

I would recognise that voice anywhere. 

By his own criteria for what constitutes the genuine prophetic element in ministry and in the church's mission, Brueggemann is also amongst the goodly fellowship of the prophets. No, he is not always right; yes at times he says again what he said before; he can at times get carried away by his own passionate lucidity and he can be so provocative you have to close the book, think about it, and more often than not, hear him out because he's on to something important. And you need to listen. 

If you have never read him, try his now famous essay, "The Costly Loss of Lament" which you can read over here. If you want to chase some of his titles, they are all listed over here.  

Two tasters. One from Prophetic Imagination, the other from Sabbath as Resistance:

"The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”

“Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption, and the endless pursuit of private well-being.”

Around the time Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God was published, a slim book of pastoral and constructive theology was published, with the telling title, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense. Some of Moltmann's most adventurous insights into the suffering love of God were given pastoral purchase in this slim volume.

Canon William Hubert Vanstone (whose contribution to church economic theory was to sell the antique vicarage furniture to pay for the repair of the church roof!) fulfilled a long ministry in Kirkholt (near Rochdale) until ill health forced him into retirement. He wrote Love's Endeavour as a reflection on those years of ministry in a commuter estate in the late fifties until the mid-seventies. It's the story of his search for a theology that would sustain the church in its mission, and himself in his vocation, in a world where God and church seemed hardly relevant.

He wrote of the precariousness of love, insisting that love can have no guaranteed outcome, and that the love of God is expressed precisely in this risk-filled vulnerability of self-giving – love is cruciform, and the cross is divine love personified, Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense.

Vanstone wrote and lived out a courageous and risk-filled theology of God's love that recognises the nature of love as that which confers freedom. Love's essence is relational freedom in which lover and beloved give and respond in grateful commitment and chosen joy. Compelled love is oppression; manipulative love is destructive; love cannot be deterministic and remain love.The idea of an all-powerful love requires, therefore, careful qualification.

The power of God’s love is not coercive, but seeks the response of those so loved. The power of God’s love is not overwhelming force but inexhaustible mercy. The power of God’s love is exerted in patient persuasion, faithful persistence, forgiveness of wrong, and the freely borne cost of loving those who are undeserving, who are hard work, and who may even reject the gift of self that is the ultimate proof of love in its purest form. Divine love is indefatigable in imaginative creativity, uncalculating in generous openness to the one loved, so that what is suffered is borne because the one who is loved is worth it. 

Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense, and its sub-title, The Response of Being to the Love of God, remains for me one of the most influential and theologically decisive books I have ever read. I genuinely treasure my now yellowing £2.95 copy of a book that has shaped and liberated many a pastor, minister, or priest engaged in the search for a pastoral theology of the love of God that takes seriously the suffering, struggles, mistakes, sins, uncertainties and anxieties and all the experienced finitudes of human life.

In daring, passionate prose, Vanstone provided me with a generous but honest vocabulary about what love is and what love must be if it reflects the love of God; precarious, out-going and out-giving, passionate, costly in investment, risk-filled, self-donating, no guaranteed outcome, faithful waiting which is patient of purpose. Vanstone gathered much of that conceptuality into one of the finest hymns on the love of God that I know, Morning Glory, Starlit Sky.  The words are set out below.

But before that, two testimonies from people who knew W H Vanstone as their priest. Years ago I wrote a couple of things about Vanstone, and had correspondence from several people who knew him well. One was a child during Vanstone’s ministry:

"My childhood memories of Mr Vanstone are magical. I was born on Kirkholt in 1957 and lived next door to the church, St Thomas. He brought all the community together what with the gang shows, cleaning his coverage (paving slabs) when we were small children for some plums, and listening to his ghost stories. I remember one especially about a dog with a man's face! We had brilliant times going Carol singing each Christmas with Mr Vanstone, singing in the stairwells of flats and always finishing up at Mrs Morgan's house for supper. Best memories of a lovely, down to earth, community gentleman. What fantastic work he did."

Then there is this brilliant character reference from one of his curates in the early 1970’s:

“I was Bill's curate in Kirkholt from 1971-74. He used to bin all his parish sermons after use. To this day, I wish I had raided the bins on Monday morning. I could have had a treasury of spiritual insight and learning.”

At the end of Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, Vanstone included a hymn which is the strong concentrate of his profound and personal theological narrative of the love of God for this wayward and recalcitrant universe, for this heartache of an earth, and for each being created by him, especially those made in God’s image.

Morning glory, starlit sky,
Leaves in springtime, swallows’ flight,
Autumn gales, tremendous seas,
Sounds and scents of summer night;

Soaring music, tow’ring words,
Art’s perfection, scholar’s truth,
Joy supreme of human love,
Memory’s treasure, grace of youth;

Open, Lord, are these, Thy gifts,
Gifts of love to mind and sense;
Hidden is love’s agony,
Love’s endeavour, love’s expense.

Love that gives gives ever more,
Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.

Drained is love in making full;
Bound in setting others free;
Poor in making many rich;
Weak in giving power to be.

Therefore He Who Thee reveals
Hangs, O Father, on that Tree
Helpless; and the nails and thorns
Tell of what Thy love must be. 

Thou are God; no monarch Thou
Thron’d in easy state to reign;
Thou art God, Whose arms of love
Aching, spent, the world sustain.

– Canon William (Bill) Hubert Vanstone

In yesterday's post I conceded that only a few books on prayer have significantly influenced my own understanding and practice of prayer. But there are several that did have lasting effect, and to which I've gone back when I needed a nudge in a prayerly direction. Oh I do realise that 'prayerly' is a made up adverb, and without needing spellcheck getting all upset about it. Sometimes if a word is not to hand, there's a case for temporary semantic improvisation.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean capable of drawing me back to that state of mind that is considerate towards God, a bit like remembering I haven't spoken to a close friend for ages.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean awakening awareness that life has become too much hassle, the day and my head is overly busy, and God is being forgotten in the whirlwind of my imagined service to Him.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean recognising and provoking that unexplained longing for God knows what; yes literally, for God knows what.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean opening up new horizons of faith, hope and love, initiating a work of inner expansion towards new trust, forward impetus, and radical compassion for the world.

It's hard to find all that in a book, and probably impossible to find it all in one book. But Richard Harries' Prayer and the Pursuit of Happiness is one of those few that even attempt nudging us in a prayerly direction. The 1985 Archbishop of Canterbury Lent Book is subversive, exhilarating, and wise. It subverts the common assumption that holiness is the crucifixion of desire, and that happiness is an unworthy human goal. It is a robustly positive account of happiness as a cluster of life qualities that lead to human fulfilment. It is filled with wisdom from across the ranges of literature, theology, art, philosophy, and all of these filtered through the pastoral experience and instincts of the author. 

The first chapter is like counter intuitive spiritual direction. Listen to what you want, and never despise wanting. Desire is a fundamentally motivating human passion and to be guided rather than suppressed. Then a whole chapter argues for the seriousness of happiness, and against the view that happiness is a trivial fascination with effervescent pleasures. The human heart hungers; for joy, for peace, for justice, for love, and for more than our words can say or our hearts can hold. Happiness may often depend on circumstances, and it's neither good nor possible to be happy all the time. But the constituents of happiness are embedded in the purposes and nature of God. Happiness matters and can be found, Harries argues as he explores joy and resurrection, joy and suffering, joy and contemplation, and all of these are rooted in the God to whom we pray and whose purpose is in our coming to be all that he calls us to be. 

The rest of the book explores peace, fulfilment, success, security, and love, each one an essay on the heart's longing and the pull of God's love, mercy and grace. Each chapter ends with a prayer. One example, from the prayers at the end of the reflection on success. "O God, most perfect love become most vulnerable, help us to share in and not spoil your great work." Happiness and success is to give our lives to sharing in, and not spoiling God's great work.

There are seven chapters, so 40 minutes a day would be more than worth the risk of investment. I would hope at least some would find themselves nudged in a prayerly direction. Now one of my friendly interlocutors complained tongue in cheek yesterday that book recommendations on this blog are costing him a fortune. Here's the thing. Prayer and the Pursuit of Happiness can be had for £2.80 postage included, or thereabouts, on a certain marketplace platform.

One of the closing prayers at the end of the book, one that always nudges me in a prayerly direction for those I love:

We hold in your presence, O Lord,

all those we love and those who love us.

Your love is so much greater than ours

and you work unceasingly for our well-being.

With all your resources of infinite wisdom and patience,

bestow on them the fullness of your blessing.  

"A religious man

is a person who holds God and man

in one thought at a time,

at all times,

who suffers in himself harm done to others,

whose greatest passion is compassion,

whose greatest strength is love

and defiance of despair."

( Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder, (New York: Crossroad, 2010.)

 Heschel was a biblical prophet born out of time. He was born in Warsaw in 1907, part of a long line of Hasidic rabbis, educated in Vilna and Berlin, fled the Nazi invasion via England to America in 1939, and became one of the most respected and influential religious figures in  the mid 20th Century United States. 

He is described as a man of "astounding knowledge, keen undersating and profound feeling; an awareness that man dwells on the tangent of the infinite, within the holy dimension; that the life of man is part of the life of God." (11) One of my all time favourite photos is of Heschel arm in arm and linked in protest with Martin Luther King on the Selma march.

Much of Heschel's writing is a gathering of essays, lectures, sermons, addresses and other occasional writing. His writing is religious writing in one specific sense; reading his words gives us a view of the heart that felt before the mind chose the words to write. In  other words his writing has the quality of the prophet who writes of what he has seen, and who has seen the indescribable. One of his favourite words in reference to God is ineffable; and as a theologian and man of faith his default disposition is wonder, awe and what he called radical amazement. 

In the Preface to his book of Yiddish poems Heschel confided about a conversation with God: " I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder. And you gave it to me." The anthology I Asked for Wonder distils into 150 pages excerpts from Heschel's writing under various headings. I mention them all because it shows the range of his thought and the core values and convictions by which he lived, and of which he wrote: God, Prayer, Sabbath, Religion, Man (Humanity), Bible, Holy Deeds, The People, The Land. 

"God is of no importance unless he is of supreme importance." That is a foundation presupposition of Heschel's thought. His struggle for words to convey the ineffability of God was lifelong, and surfaces repeatedly in his writing: 

"To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words…The tangent of the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. The world of things we perceive is but a veil. Its flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable…. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder."

If I'm honest, there are very few books about prayer that I have found helpful. That isn't a dismissal of the careful thought and holy learning and rich experience that went into writing such books. I think it is acceptance that prayer does not consist in practices and techniques, nor approaches modelled by others, nor even good advice or uplifting accounts of personal experience of God. All of these have their place. It was Heschel who, along with one or two others, helped me to break out of the self-centred, self-interested and overly self-conscious practice of prayer as a kind of contract with the Almighty. 

"The focus of prayer is not the self…it is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centred thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer. Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let His will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to Him in our will, an effort to make Him the Lord of our soul. We submit our interests to His concern, and seek to be allied with what is ultimately right." 

It was that view of prayer, and a lifetime of such praying that impelled Heschel to march against the Vietnam war, to walk alongside the Selma marchers, to rail against the blasphemy that uses the fundamental elements of matter to create nuclear weapons, a reversal of God's creative purpose. 

Sabbath is one of Heschel's most widely read books. Written to describe an alternative to consumer frenzy, the pursuit of affluence, and the commodification of time, it reads like the slow movement of a concerto about God's runaway world. 

"The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to the holiness of time. It is a day on which we are called to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world."

And so on. This is a wonderful anthology of the richer thoughts of a great religious thinker, one who took God with utmost seriousness as an agent of mercy and justice in His own creation. He was an ecumenical Jew, open to understand other faith traditions, and deeply secure in his own faith convictions. To read Heschel is to listen to a wise voice speaking hopefully in a despairing world, and telling a truth that arises from the deep core of reality to be found in such human longings as eternity, transcendence, everlasting mercy, and the home of the heart in the heart of God.  

 

 

In 1989 I walked into Waterstone's in Aberdeen and headed for the poetry section. There it was. The paperback edition of The Echoes Return Slow. I'd been reading R S Thomas for some time and found him to be the voice of one crying in the wilderness, "Make straight the paths of the Lord." 

It isn't all that far fetched to compare RST to John the Baptist. Thomas shows the same righteous anger, zeal for justice founded on peace, and determined passion about a God most clearly seen on the cross. Some of RST's best poetry has as the cantus firmus, "Behold the lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world." The Welsh priest, no less than the Judean prophet, spoke uncomfortable truth to comfortable power, raged on behalf of a God too easily taken for granted, and had his times when he had to ask if the One he followed, believed in, wrestled with, really was the Promised One. 

The God who inhabits Thomas's poetry is recognisably biblical, the God whose coming is in fire, judgement and apocalyptic warning. Much of The Echoes Return Slow is autobiographical, not only the chronology and circumstances of the poet's life, but the experiences of love and loneliness, faith and questioning, and in particular his experience of ambiguity and even ambivalence, about the awe inducing mystery of God.

There isn't a sentimental line in all his poetry so far as I know. The God who is present can be oppressively present, or painfully absent; the Creator's prerogatives over nature are usurped by human science and technology at humanity's peril; the countryside, the sea and coast, the mountains, all provide a theological landscape where God hides, and can be found only, and if at all, on God's say so.

The Echoes Return Slow is a strangely beautiful book. On the left page is a prose poem, its theme echoed in verse on the right page. The book progresses from his birth, through his growing up, marriage, priesthood, and into those later years. He would live twelve years after Echoes was published, and three more volumes would follow. Those who love the poetry of R S Thomas have their favourite volume – I would cheat and claim his Collected Poems were my favourites, but if I had to choose from around 25 published volumes I'd go for Experimenting with an Amen (1986) and Echoes.

I find it hard to quote bits of Thomas's poems. They are complete statements, and fragments distort, obscure or miss the point of the whole. So I quote two poems in which the priest poet, late in life, is still seeking and sometimes finding, and sometimes being found.

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. 

……………………………………..

The church is small.
The walls inside
white. On the altar
a cross, with behind it
its shadow and behind
that the shadow of its shadow.

The world outside
knows nothing of this
nor cares. The two shadows
are because of the shining
of two candles: as many
the lights, so many
the shadows. So we learn
something of the nature
of God, the endlessness
of whose recessions
are brought up short
by the contemporaneity of the Cross.

……………………………………………

 The blurb on the back of Echoes is written by someone who 'gets' R S Thomas. It was from a review written for The Listener (How I miss that weekly tonic for the mind).

"One of the few living poets whose language one feels emerges from a genuinely silent and attentive waiting on meaning…he gives us the best religious poetry we are likely to get."

Waiting on Meaning; now there's a ready made title for a monograph on Thomas's faith, spirituality and poetry! 

In 1976 Amos N Wilder published a brilliant and seminal book on the relationship between poetry and theology. The title was Theopoetic. Theology and the Religious Imagination. It explores the relationship between poetic language and theological language. The search for words adequate to the ineffable will inevitably frustrate. The crafting of images even approximate to the writer's experience of God requires imaginative reverence, disciplined restraint, and the courageous risk of being misunderstood. Patience with the limits of language, persistence in fashioning words with capax dei, and urgency of soul in seeking to know and be known by the God who is nevertheless worshipped, that requires a lifelong willingness to "wait on meaning." 

(The two poems are found in The Echoes Return Slow, R S Thomas, (London: Papermac, 1988)  pages 79 and 83.