I've long listened to Carrie newcomer as a voice to be trusted. Her poetry is set to music, her music is in the words as much as the notes. Some of her best work explores our deep places where ache and longing are felt most acutely. Her words come with that gentle and humane understanding that sometimes hearts break, and aren't easily put together again.

Consolation is one of those words that sounds old fashioned, archaic, hard to use in our Twitter-Instagram-Facebook-Text saturated social media exchanges. But I like it. My equally old fashioned non-online bulky Collin's Dictionary defines its meaning:  "a person or thing that is a source of comfort in a time of suffering, grief and disappointment."  Some of Carrie Newcomer's songs are best described as consolation set to music. Of course, there is a much wider emotional and experiential sweep to her poetry and music, including issues of justice, peace-building, human kindness, love as so much more than  romance, but not denying that either. 

Once we listen to someone's work over a long time, (and my first Newcomer encounter was 25 years ago with albums like My True Name. I've learned how to listen to her and like that recent bestselling book The Poetry Pharmacy, her music is a prescription pad of medicines capable of being applied to the whole rainbow of human experiences. Including those times when our hearts need consoling.

Another word in danger of being devalued by either misuse or falling into disuse is 'comfort' The word stripped back to its original oak grain means to surround with strength, to fortify, and so to help the heart hold itself together. Newcomer's music is comfort in this strong sense of inner transformation, renewal of strength and hope, pushing back the shadows, noticing the first green shoots, pointing to the first fingers of dawn, inviting us to sing again with words that are both prayer and a recovery of thew ability to say yes. 

Here are the lyrics of one of the songs that I think does this. It comes from the album The Beautiful Not Yet. It can be heard over here.  

Winter is the oldest season
But quietly beneath the snow
Seeds are stretching out and reaching
Faithful as the morning glow

Carry nothing but what you must
Lean in toward the Light
Let it go, shake off the dust
Lean in toward the Light
Today is now, tomorrow beckons
Lean in toward the Light
Keep practicing resurrection

The shadows of this world will say
There's no hope why try anyway?
But every kindness large or slight
Shifts the balance toward the light

Waters wind and open wide
Lean in toward the Light
Don't just walk when you can fly
Lean in toward the Light
When justice seems in short supply
Lean in toward the Light
Let beauty be your truest guide

The shadows of this world will say
There's no hope why try anyway?
But every kindness large or slight
Shifts the balance toward the light

The prayer I pray at eventide
Lean in toward the Light
All left undone be put aside
Lean in toward the Light

When forgiveness is hard to find
Lean in toward the Light
Help me at least to be kind
Lean in toward the Light

Preaching this morning on "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."
Which is a prayer for forgivingness,  a committed disposition towards reconciliation, marked by patient persistence in peace-building and cultivating habits of mercy.
On the way back, on the skyline over the sea, a murmuration of starlings demonstrating the beauty of synchonised movement in a world so often conflicted.
At the same time, The World at One on Radio 4 reporting and discussion of Iran and Australia, both in very different ways, places of human crisis in this so often conflicted world.
Changed to Classic FM and found some light-hearted Baroque.
Over lunch watching Monty Don in Japanese Gardens, and the story of the rose called Peace. Hence the photo
Tonight reading again Dag Hammarskjold, whose words were quoted this morning:

"Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, and what is soiled is made clean again.

That word 'again' –

              a hope filled word,

                      a hope restoring word,

                           which we need to hear,

                                 again and again.

“Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.”

Wordsworth's sonnet says most of whatever explanation best describes why readers read, and go on reading throughout their lives. Every year a list of what has been read is in effect an aide memoir to all those hours spent in another world of fiction, or looking at the world differently through poetry, or stretching the range of understanding on some of life's intricate puzzles, whether philosophical, or theological, or learning how the world works in politics, economics, environmental studies, and taking time to understand history, which amongst other benefits, helps us understand how we got here, and whether 'here' is a good place to be.

My own reading in 2019 was constrained by the work, and it is arduous work, of readjusting our lives around the passing of our daughter Aileen. Grief relativises much that previously seemed important, and displaces and occasionally makes impossible for a time, many of the normal activities of life. But reading has been one of the ways I have negotiated a way forward. That movement has been slow, at times uncertain, sometimes having to double back because the road ahead seemed cut off for now. Diversions abound on the road of sorrow, but sometimes the detours open up landscapes we would otherwise miss.

As Wordsworth said, 'books are each a world'. Our world is less stable than it has been for a long time. Trying to understand hard right populism, and the threats it poses to peace and human welfare, I read quite widely around ideology and public discourse. Three books expanded my awareness of the sheer scale and threat of the problem. Madeleine Albright's Fascism. A Warning, delivers exactly what the title says. Her historical analysis of Germany and Italy in the 1930's, and of Venezuela, Turkey and Russia, prepare the way for trying to understand what is happening in the United States, and more recently still, here in the United Kingdom. The book is a spelling out of the moves that undermine democracy, pave the way for authoritarian government, and threaten human and civil rights.

Alongside Albright's stark warnings, I read Believe Me. The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump by the social and Constitutional historian John Fea. Trump didn't land like a meteorite in the back garden of Washington. The way was prepared by a whole lot of cultural shifts, social dislocations and disillusions, amongst them the co-opting of the white evangelical constituency. Fea's book asks and tries to answer three questions:

What would it take to replace fear with Christian hope?

What would it take to replace the pursuit of power with humility?

What would it take to replace nostalgia with history.

Fea sets out to examine fear, pursuit of power and nostalgia as the cultural drivers that led to the Trump presidency. As an historian, and an evangelical scholar, he deconstructs the rationalisations, compromises and damaging inconsistencies that underpin evangelical support for Trump. The consequences for the integrity and future of evangelicalism as a movement, are morally perilous and theologically untenable. 

My research interests include the history of biblical criticism and how the Bible has been understood and received down the centuries. An older classic is by W B Glover, Nonconformity and Higher Criticism in the 19th Century. Scarce as a used book, I tracked one down and read it with admiration for the scholarly discipline and industry of those who spent their lives digging into ancient texts, and the cultures and contexts from which they emerged.

One of the most moving and enlightening books this year was James Edwards,Between the Swastika and the Sickle, about the life, disappearance and execution of Ernst Lohmeyer, a brilliant German New Testament scholar murdered by Russian forces in 1946. I have also been using Lohmeyer's magisterial study of The Lord's Prayer; now out of print it can still be picked up as a used book, reasonably priced, and well worth having. My review of Between the Swastika and the Sickle was published in June in an earlier post here.

Related to the story of Lohmeyer, a German who struggled with great courage to resist Nazi policies intended to hijack the intellectual integrity of the Universities, is another book published 25 years ago. Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust by David Gushee (first published 1994 based on his Thesis, revised 2003) was the first detailed account of the role of Righteous Gentiles in saving Jewish lives, often at the cost of their own lives and those of their family. The book remains utterly relevant in today's political climate of hostile environments, immigration scapegoating, and minimising the dangers of nationalism stripped of humility and any sense of the community of nations. The cry to make our nation great again assumes that the much trumpeted greatness, if it ever existed, was morally secure in its foundations. That is a highly questionable assumption; nor is the seeking of national greatness a goal beyond moral critique.   

So some of the 2019 reading highlights took me into serious territory, brimming with ethical dilemmas, or were attempts to understand our current political anxieties, and in the background much reading around how to interpret the Bible responsibly in a politically volatile climate. These weren't the only ones read, but in different ways they clarified issues and made historical comparisons by way of either warning or encouragement.   

Years ago a friend who took himself and the world a bit too seriously used to talk about his "inner climate". It is a phrase capable of carrying a fair load of emotional baggage. 

Living in the North East of Scotland, you quickly realise that the skies are big, and the cloud formations, the receding horizons and the variations in the shades and qualities of light, all combine to create a huge range of diverse impressions and differing ways of looking at the world. The changing moods of the landscape can move rapidly and dramatically from shafting winter sunlight that harmonises with inner happiness, to a late gloom that gives visible form to whatever foreboding lurks beneath the everyday activities of our living. In other words, sometimes the mood of the weather and landscape mirror the inner climate; but sometimes they determine how we are feeling, or yet again are reminders that our inner climate is neither fixed nor permanent and can change rapidly and inexplicably.

This past week, for example, has included dark days and sunny, and these can be mixed and alternated into several variations in the same few hours. I often become aware of this when I look at photographs taken while walking and watching. In woods, along the beach, around where we live, the skies, the landscape and the weather act as an external commentary of the world, that interacts with the inner landscape and weather of our mood and our inner journey. 

These two photos of the sea (above) was taken around mid day, when the skies were leaden and laden, and the sea reflected that shadowed grey, emphasised and interpreted by white waves tumbling towards the shore. I was aware while taking that photo, of the confluence of symbols; vessels waiting offshore for their next contract, or their place in the harbour; the offshore wind-farm turning turbulent wind into reusable energy; clouds heavy with possibility; the sea restless and rhythmic. On this occasion the whole scene encapsulates one of those key moments in our lives when we see things clearly, and feel them deeply, when outer world and inner world coincide in mood.

At the start of a new year, where will the energy come from that will enable the fulfilment of those hopes and plans we all need to pull us towards our future? And those clouds, which remind me of a verse from a remarkable and far too easily overlooked hymn: Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, The clouds you so much dread, Are big with mercy, and shall break, With blessings on your head. And that wave breaking hopefully towards the shore, an ocean of life and energy concentrated, for this brief moment of its existence, in a movement of breathtaking sound and sight;and that faithful rhythm sounding like the heartbeat of the "Love that moves the sun and other stars". 

Walking the beach with a camera is for me a way of praying, thinking, and sometimes unexpectedly, inner climate change. We all have our places, or times, when God is more or less present. This past year especially, the sea has been a place which refuses merely to reflect my mood; sometimes it does, but sometimes being by the sea has been a place of healing, solace and inner climate change, when the clouds have been interpreted and the sun has broken through, and the horizons have been lines of hope and possibility. 

    God's boundless mercy is, to sinful man,
    Like to the ever-wealthy ocean:
    Which though it sends forth thousand streams,
    T'is ne'er known, or else seen, to be the emptier;
    And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more
    Full, and fill'd full, than when full fill'd before.
  (Robert Herrick)

The first day of the New Year is –

an artist starting on a fresh canvas – with an idea

a reader discovering a new author – and prepared to give her a chance.

an athlete still wanting to improve their personal best – but comfortable with who they are 

a cook about to try a new recipe – and hoping the result will be edible

a writer looking at a blank page – without anxiety 

a gardener ordering seeds, bulbs – and a new spade

a student on their graduation day – knowing they don't know everything

a driver in a hurry to get there – but without speeding

and

a diary filled full – of possibility, opportunity and clean pages

with enough space to make some of the above actually happen!

(For those unfamiliar with the building, it is the Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, photographed at the start of a new day. The goal posts in the foreground have their own educational symbolism – go for it!)  

"The truth which liberates is the power of love, for God is love.

The father of the lie binds us to himself by binding us to ourselves –

or to that in us which is not our true self.

Love liberates from the father of the lie

because it liberates us from our false self to our true self –

to that self which is grounded in true reality.

Therefore, distrust every claim for truth

where you do not see truth united with love;

and be certain that you are of the truth

and that the truth has taken hold of you

only when love has taken hold of you

and has started to make you free from yourselves."

(Paul Tillich, The New Being, page 74)

Timothy Radcliffe is a refreshing writer. Former Master of the Dominican Order he has long and varied experience of the ways in which cultural changes and successive social, technological and economic reconfigurations in recent decades have eroded Christian confidence in the spiritualities, traditions and ethics of Christian existence. As a writer he's hard to label. His books combine spirituality, biblical reflection, cultural comment, and what is best called Christian life coaching, in a gently suggestive rather than guru directive kind of way. Reading him is like listening to the voice of a non directive spiritual director!

Each chapter in this book read like spirituality in the form of literary essays, fairly loosely connected despite the contents page, but in each one wisdom is woven across a framework of Christian devotion, cultural observation, perceptive psychology and humane learning. The plan of the book is an exploration of discipleship which begins with two chapters under the heading 'Imagination'. The eclipse of imagination by technologically generated virtual worlds, or by the reduction of the everyday world to rational pragmatics, economic imperatives of consumption and possession, and reductionist explanations that ignore life's deeper questions,has left our culture under-equipped to seek, and sense and desire the transcendent. The recovery of imagination is essential if human beings are to grow into mature humanity and rediscover the gift of their own creation. "An awakened sense of the transcendent goes with freeing our minds from the trivialisation of contemporary culture, its tendency to be reductive and simplistic." (11)

On the basis that life is to be lived imaginatively as well as responsibly, Radcliffe encourages his readers to 'Choose Life', and that means becoming a disciple of Jesus. Hence the three main sections of the book, Journeying, Teaching, and The Risen Life. As of this post, I'm still at the journeying stage. Throughout the Gospel narrative the disciples are on an adventure with risk and cost as well as blessing; there will always be suffering, hurt and situations that make the heart ache; there will be confrontations with evil and a willingness to negate the negations and negativity in which evil thrives. God's purpose is creation, and evil is the undoing of creation. The journey is a maturing process, as each disciple discovers what true humanity is in obedience to God and service to others in the name of Christ. 

What I've found in this first quarter of the book is a writer whose words have the purpose of inviting exploration, provoking new thought, and facilitating a conversation with the reader that is at times searching, and at other times reassuring. Radcliffe writes as a knowing Christian; as a monk responsible for the healthy development of a long monastic tradition; as a man with his own struggles, illness, and weaknesses; and as a writer who respects the intelligence of the reader.

As someone who enjoys books well seasoned with quotations, even I began to wonder if Radcliffe was trying to cram in more than the argument needed, either as evidence, illustration or as mnemonic summaries of what he was arguing. In the end it makes the book both more interesting, and more meandering, and a treasure trove for preachers; and Radcliffe is a very fine preacher himself. Here is one example of Radcliffe on quotation overload, the first paragraph of chapter 2:

"How then can Christianity engage the imagination of our contemporaries? I shall focus on one question – there are others – which is both the core of our questing faith and also a preoccupation of all human beings; what does it mean to be alive? John Lennon wrote in his lyric 'Beautiful Boy', 'Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.' He is not far from John Henry Newman's warning,'Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.' In Rose Tremain's novel Music and Silence, one of the characters decides that 'the secret of a successful life is not to die before one's death.'"

See what I mean?

Before Advent I was preaching my way through the Lord's Prayer. Again. This time in the cultural context of the chaotic and at times toxic political climate of this past year. Whose kingdom counts most? Whose will to power should we support? What political leader is the least worst choice when politics itself is losing its capacity for constructive dialogue, civil discourse, a shared commitment to the common good. Is the Lord's Prayer too heavenly minded to be any use in countering the hard-edged cynicism and divisive rhetoric of life online?

And then there's that awkwardly ordinary request for bread. If Jesus was teaching his followers a pattern prayer, setting precedents and priorities, what on earth has bread to do with it? Quite a lot as it turns out, in a world where food is weaponised against those we oppose (sanctions); where food is wasted on an industrial scale; in which starvation and malnutrition remain a way of life for millions of people. What on earth does it mean to pray "Give us this day our daily bread" in the developed world where food security is now a crucial component of a nation's economic, foreign and defence policies? That small loaf makes the Lord's Prayer a searing critique of our politics, economics and ethics. Jesus teaches us to pray for enough food for all of us; and us doesn't just mean me and mine.   

Advent interrupted the sequence, so now on the first Sunday of the New Year, we will confront an even more demanding choice. Can we pray this – "Forgive us our wrongs, as we forgive those who have wronged us." No getting away from it; Jesus requires the kind of openness before God that is nothing less than a health check on all our relationships. 

Forget the walk in the park that is the New Year resolution charade. To pray these words is to enter a binding agreement with God that we will sort out our relationships. Reconciliation takes two sides to make peace; yes, but a Christian is a minister of reconciliation, and carries a portfolio on peacemaking. Forgiveness is something else, and no less demanding. The Lord's Prayer compels us to return regularly to the unfinished business of dealing with anger, memories, bitterness, grudges, grievances, misunderstandings, dislikes, and yes, hates.  

To pray the Lord's prayer as if we mean to practice it, is a daily exercise in reorientation towards others. And to pray for forgiveness and link that to our own intentional forgiving is to begin to take seriously the mercy that has forgiven us. The start of a New Year then becomes an opportunity for relational healing, and a recovery of love as the quality control of our emotional life. The Lord's Prayer is an eye opener, restoring our sight so that we see those who have become strangers to us in a new light. It is to pray for a heart that is Christlike in its default mechanisms of love and peacemaking, working towards mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation.

As much as any sermon a preacher ever dares to preach, a sermon on the forgiveness petition requires to be preached and practised first to the heart of the preacher. For a Christian community which is the embodied life of Christ a life of forgivingness is as demanding as it gets. 

On Christmas morning there wasn't much beach left to walk on. The tide was fully in, and a walk along the shoreline was a game of tag with the waves as they broke on the last two or three metres of sand. So a linear stroll became a meandering wander, avoiding wet feet but wanting to be near the gathered energy and final sprint of each wave. The result was not so much a walk on the beach, as a dance with waves, with the occasional broken rhythm, and these reflecting the inner ebb and flow, and broken rhythms of my own spirit.

On Christmas morning, walking the shoreline watchfully at full tide, I became aware of an inner coalescence of deep and self-defining emotional responses. That sentence needs some explanation. The first part is theological conviction; the second is personal history; and the third part is when these two perspectives merge in a deep acceptance of what faith in God entails when great loss and great joy reside in the same heart. 

1. Christmas day is the high holiday of Christian faith, its priority over Good Friday, Easter morning and Pentecost being both liturgical and theological. Advent begins the liturgical year and comes prior to everything else; it is also true that the incarnation is the theological prerequisite of the ministry, passion and resurrection of Jesus and is the precondition of making any sense at all of the Christian story. The incarnation, the voluntary vulnerability of God in Christ is the high tide of Divine Love at its most creative, purposeful and self-expending. The birth of Jesus is the decisive initiative of God in revealing, demonstrating, and evidencing once and for all his purpose of reconciliation. Every Advent the Christian soul is confronted with the scandal of Bethlehem, and the sheer embarrassment of that manger. Three times Luke mentions it; but not without spelling out the shocking paradox: "born to you..a Saviour, Messiah, Lord…and this sign…wrapped in cloths, lying in a manger." The one whose three names out rank Caesar's claims to deity and lordship and world authority, is a baby in a cow feeding trough.

2. Advent this year has had a deeper than usual significance for me. The celebration of the birth of the Christ child inexorably reminds every parent of the birth and the gift of their own children. Exactly a year ago on Christmas Eve, our daughter Aileen died, and the rhythms of our family life were irreparably broken. Life of course goes on, but no metaphor is near adequate to explain or describe what that means. A jigsaw that has lost pieces and is now essentially incomplete; a journey that seemed to have a set destination now diverted into strange and even frightening landscapes of life experiences; a piece of rare china falls and is broken, and however skilfully repaired, will never again ring with the clear sound of intended wholeness. Something beautiful, unique and irreplaceable is lost beyond recall, and that loss is felt in the deepest fundaments of the human heart where love, hope, joy, fulfilment and our own ultimate identity are formed. 

3. So walking by the sea on Christmas morning, dodging the more determined incoming waves, my heart was already in tune with the deepest chords of my faith; "for unto us a child is born…God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself…glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace." But there were broken rhythms too, because my heart was also ebbing and flowing with memories of love and laughter, loss and longing. In contrast to the joy of the angels, the nosy curiosity of the shepherds, the adoration of the Magi, there was the now familiar ache of love seeking its rightful owner, Aileen. There is in the Christmas story, at least for this bereaved parent, something of the pierced heart of Mary and, God knows, a sense that on this day of all days, God comes close to those who grieve for their child.

It took the whole day for all of this to settle into words that might make some sense. Not complete sense, but a way of holding in one heart the joy of the birth of the Christ child, and the sorrow of a parent's greatest grief. An understanding glimpsed, of how the waves of joy and sorrow, the ebb and flow of faith, the rhythms of life, are to be lived as faithfully and fruitfully as our weakness and strength allows. And in all of this, the growing acceptance that brokenness and wholeness, risk and trust, grief and gladness, fear and faith, despair and hope – these are the rhythms of life, the low and high tides of a life mysteriously gifted, and graced by the God who came amongst us in the Christ child, knowing that self-surrender would break His heart.

(The photo immediately above was taken some years ago, showing the storm-exposed remnants of old breakwaters on Aberdeen beach, viewed from a quite precise angle).