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I first came across the name Abraham Joshua Heschel while reading early books by Walter Brueggemann. It was Heschel's work on the prophets he cited. It's a remarkable exposition of the Hebrew mind in prophetic mode, when the world is looked at with God on the horizon, and through the lens of trust, even if at times that trust was expressed in defiance. After that I went looking for other volumes by this philosopher Rabbi and found myself absorbed into a mindset that can best be described as reason within the limits of faith. This was Jewish faith in love with a world that exists by the gift of God, and in which every human being is a guest expected to behave with courtesy, gratitude and wonder.

Indeed one of Heschel's recurring chords is made up of notes like wonder, amazement and awe. I have read few writers whose words carry within them such freighted ideas of holiness, mystery and the sense of God's immediacy. His best work was written in the 1950's and 60's, two decades of turmoil, change, excitement, danger and expanding possibilities for human hope or harm. A post war and post Holocaust world; a world of atomic weapons and an arms race, an iron curtain, a space race, and a cold war; Korean and Vietnam wars, and civil rights movements; growing affluence and the birth of the consumer society. They were years of radical change, technological development and an increasing sense of moral peril as human technical capacity outstripped human moral maturtity.  

Heschel was convinced that hope lay in human co-operation, mutual respect and help across racial, religious and national borders, an enhanced awareness of how to contain human capacity for conflict born out of fear, greed or lust for power. He had fled Europe and survived when many of his family and those who lived as his neighbours perished in the Holocaust. He never forgot the dehumanising rhetoric, demonising political ideologies, developed systems of bureaucracy and administration which were used as webs and nets to capture and exterminate his people. Carbon copies, index cards, ledgers of figures, updated address lists, birth and marriage certificates – good office management at the service of a murderous regime

Yet Heschel betrays no nurtured enmities nor cherished bitterness. He lived looking forward hopeful but not naive, passionate about justice and peace, and his view of the world clarified and deepened by his immersion in the Torah, and in the literature of his people. He was a deeply religious man. If that sounds obvious, then let him describe what that implies in his own words:

"A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers in himself harms done to others, whose great passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair." 

When I'm looking for a refresher course on compassion I go to Heschel; if I forget what holiness looks like and acts like, I read Heschel; If I look at the mess of the world, globalised, polarised and  destabilised, I ponder words like those above and pray to be the kind of person he describes, and that last clause, "whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair." I can happily make that a mission statement for life lived well.  

Two of my favourite pastimes – walking on the beach and writing Haiku. The two came together a few years ago after I picked up several shells. I'm not sure what it is that so fascinates about beach walking, but there's a combination of curiosity and unpredictability that often compels me to walk with head down. 

Stones shaped by the motion of millions of waves; shells which used to be home for creatures now long gone; wood seasoned and smoothed by the actions of sand and water; fragments of pottery and glass worn and polished and now discarded for the pleasure of the finder. Such are the gifts of the sea.

That parable about the farmer ploughing a field and hitting a box that has treasure inside. Now and again I've felt a similar lurch of excitement on finding just this object, here, now. My mother often said to me when I was a child, "You're easy pleased." I guess I was, and am, because I've always valued and taken pleasure in things that weren't expensive, some of them items which have little value, if by that is meant commercial worth or sale-ability. 

Take these three shells. I don't have them now. They were picked up years ago and disappeared some time after. At the time, they made me stop and pay attention. These shells were handled, examined, enjoyed for the small if transient masterpieces that nature scatters everywhere.

The Haiku are neither exhaustive description nor clever semantic game playing. They are statements of admiration, and gratitude for the brief pleasure of contemplative seeing, which is like a low key but patient kind of wondering at the ubiquitous beauty at our feet. As a Christian, such ubiquitous beauty nudges mind and imagination to the thought of God's creative purposes and overflowing love for all that God makes. And that is theology in a seashell.

More recently I collected another handful of shells, which for now sit on my window ledge. Again I wrote a Haiku to distil my response to these lovely but discarded creations.

Calcified dwellings;
sadness, of homeless creatures,
and creatureless homes.

What prompted the sadness of those lines? I had been thinking of the rhythms and cycles of the natural world, such as the ebb and flow of life, the come and go of the seasons, the dependence of growth and new life on seeds sown in soil made fertile by the death of the very plants which produced the seeds.

So not unqualified sadness, more a poignant reminder of the fragility and transience that is the life we live. And therefore a reminder too, of the call to gratitude as one of the default dispositions of the heart and the mind. Life is more precious than we realise. Is it a new kind of besetting sin to be part of a culture so preoccupied with living, so relentlessly fixated on the cost of living, so often helpless to control the pace of living, that life itself slips through our fingers, like sand?

Ages ago, so it seems, T S Eliot asked the question more pointedly in The Rock, one of The Four Quartets. "Where is the life we have lost in living?" Walking along the beach can be for me, a time of inner recalibration of mind and heart. Those small discarded objects, with their strange allure and serendipitous appearance at my feet, dare me to slow down, and think, and wonder, and find time for thankfulness and to relearn the importance of patient wonder.   

For four months I have been working on a tapestry designed around the Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich; in particular her vision of 'the little thing, the size of a hazelnut'. Here is the passage:

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’

I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”

Of course Julian is best known for her theology of hope, in words that have become so popular they are in danger of becoming a cliche: "And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." But that theological hopefulness was never for Julian a misleading optimism about the reality of evil, and the human experiences of darkness, such as grief, suffering, loneliness, guilt, fear, and encroaching despair at the brokenness of the world. 

That future orientation towards a renewed creation in which all would be made well, was imagined and energised in a soul that had pondered for years on her visions of the Divine Love, which poured from the wounds of the crucified Christ. Julian's interpretation of the hazelnut, which to her seemed so vulnerable, precarious and fragile and with what seemed a tenuous hold on existence, took its form and confidence from her growing conviction of the eternal Love which creates, sustains and brings to purposed fulfilment all that God has made.

The tapestry images play with images of hazelnut, our planet and the ever expanding realities of "all that is made". The size of the hazelnut, the earth and the sun is the same, because in the Love of God significance is not in size or importance, but in the relationship of Creator to creation.

The work grew out of the text above, and was enriched over the months by regular reading of The Revelations. The eventual pattern evolved, and the lines and colours were trial and error, and occasionally I unpicked some parts which didn't work, seemed wrong, and needed to be reworked. As to the overall concept, one friend captured much of what was being attempted when she wrote, in response to the finished work, "the fluidity of line and shape feel right for Julian, who is never a straight edge person."

The decision to make the earth the same size as the hazelnut, and to frame them separately within the landscape, was made early on. I was playing with the idea of  her hand-held hazelnut, "round as any ball", and the round earth, indeed all that exists, being held in the hand of the Creator. The sun is the same size and the light emanates to the farthest reaches; it also shines brightest behind the hazelnut – a theme important in my own theology, "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not."

The blue ribbon has several layers of significance. Julian makes much of Mary, as one who brings together the humanity and divinity of Jesus; and her colour is blue. Across the landscape of "all that is" flows "the river of the waters of life", the life-giving energy of the God who will make all things well. In Medieval iconography blue is the colour of divine majesty, and in the crucified Christ majesty and meekness coalesce in the redemptive love that is revealed to Julian. That majestic love is edged in red, a colour that signifies sacrifice. 

Each will find their own meanings within the work. It's hard for me as the artist to reduce to words and explanation what is a work of creative and visual exegesis, using colours, techniques, materials and stitches which are both deeply personal choice, and creatively purposeful improvisation. It is a prayer in stitches, an exegesis in colour and form, a tapestry of a text in which theological truth, mystical vision and spiritual experience distil into Revelations of Divine Love. 

But one further thought. Julian has no interest in speculative mysticism cut loose from Christian orthodox doctrine. Oh yes, she pushes the boundaries to their limits, but when she writes of the love of God, her ideas are deeply embedded in orthodox Christology, coloured through and through by a richly embroidered atonement theology. Themes of creation, fall and redemption are woven throughout her work, and the central image of the Cross and the crucified Christ constrain her theological speculations, and results in a mind that is restlessly curious, yet patiently contemplative, and therefore produces a work that did not fit existing categories of ecclesial teaching.

Julian's Revelations are at one and the same time, securely orthodox but with deep and well nourished roots capable of subverting the foundations of some of those fixed boundaries; not to diminish the Gospel, but to expand understanding of inexhaustible truth. Some of that creative subversion may also be hinted at in the finished tapestry.    

One of my favourite places is Findochty, up on the Moral coast. Sitting above the fishing village is the Parish Church, a building which has been there well over a century and a half. Every time I see it, built on the rock, I hear again that strangely reassuring promise, "On this rock I will build my church…"  

That time when Jesus said to Peter, "You are Simon. From now on you shall be called Rock, and on this Rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell shall not overcome it..ever!" Not the shifting sand that was the volatile Peter, as if such fragmented liquidity could bear the weight of the mission of God. The Rock of faith, embedded in what is revealed. That's what Jesus meant. "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God", said Peter. True enough, said Jesus. But flesh and blood haven;t revealed that to you. It was my Father in heaven.

So brilliant as his insight was, it wasn't Peter's genius that made the penny drop. It was God, opening the mind to understand, opening the ears to hear, and opening the eyes to see, and opening his heart to the truth and demand of Jesus. That is the rock on which the church is founded, secured, rooted and grounded in the love of God. The church is made up of people; fallible but forgiven, human but called God's children, as far as the world is concerned, followers of Jesus are daft and deluded, but in truth, they have found a truth that unlocks life and opens up possibility.

Faith is not certainty; it is risk, but it is trustful risk. Faith is not something we work ourselves up to, as if it was about will power; faith is that strangely disruptive responsiveness to something that calls us beyond ourselves, to a different way of looking at the world, and a changed way of living.

Poor Peter, brilliant Peter, big-mouth Peter who spoke first and tried to edit it later. As soon as he had blurted out that impossible truth about Jesus, he's told he's got a new name, a different identity, a changed purpose for life, and he is called to a new faithfulness and obedience to this travelling carpenter Rabbi.

Such faith, risk, trust and obedience has a durability and stability that goes beyond flesh and blood. It's like granite. It lasts and endures and bears enormous weight of circumstance and change and challenge. It's a rock, and on that kind of rock-faith, Jesus said, I will build my church.

(This is the first of several reflections on the church set on a hill and built on a rock.)

Regular readers here will know that one of my interests is designing and working tapestry. Over the years I've completed around 20 original pieces, some of them as gifts to special people on special days.

More recently I've been experimenting with the use of tapestry as a form of visual exegesis. During the design and working of a particular tapestry, I 'dwell' within a text, reading it regularly and absorbing what the words seem to be saying, especially before working the next phase. Colour, image, shape and form are each allowed to emerge in an evolving design.

Most times there is no inner idea of the finished work, and often the design changes as I go along. At some point the design of the piece, which began as an undeveloped attraction to the text, and grew in the working, takes on a final form and is worked from a roughly sketched outline. 

The current piece (detail below) is based on Julian of Norwich, and in particular, two of her most famous passages from The Revelations of Divine Love. Her parable of the hazelnut has long been a favourite of anthologists; and any who have read her Revelations will immediately recall the simplicity and theological profundity of her vision of her own hand, and in it "a tiny thing the size of a hazelnut."

"And in this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind's eye it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, "What can this be?" And the answer came to me, "It is all that is made". I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, "It lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and in the same way everything exists through the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three attributes: the first is that God made it, the second is that he loves it, the third is that God cares for it." 

Out of that everyday ordinary miracle of a kernel in its protective shell, Julian drew a wondering sense of the immensity of God's creative and sustaining love, and a corresponding awareness of how small, fragile and dependent is the whole of creation. But that whole and entire Creation is held in the hand of one whose love pervades and sustains all and everything that is, including every 'dear soul'. 

The second theme, which follows logically and theologically from her vision of God's love sustaining in existence all that God has made, is Julian's famous cry of hope:"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." Invariably quoted out of context, it reads like saccharine optimism, life's artificial sweetener. And when fitted within the universe of her revelations, it is a powerful cry of eschatological hope which, given her historical context of tragic and terrifying events, sounds even more like a classic denial and evasion of reality.

Not so. Few writers have faced up to the swathes of suffering that swirl around human life with more realism and look-the-world-in-the-face honesty. But she refuses to make sin the defining reality of the universe; indeed her faith in the cross as the source of redemptive and renewing power is a red thread woven throughout her Revelations. As James Denney, (another of my theological guides) once said to a Victorian Free Church of Scotland congregation in Greenock: 

"What is revealed at the cross is redeeming love, and it is revealed as the last reality of the universe, the eternal truth of what God is. It is before the foundation of the world; nay the very foundations of the world are laid in it….You wish to know the final truth about God? Here it is, eternal love bearing sin." (The Way Everlasting, p.24-5)  

I doubt there is a better summary of Julian's vision, notwithstanding Denney had no patience for either mysticism or metaphysics. But here's the thing. Where these two theologians of the cross intersect is precisely in their assertion that the love of God is cruciform and Christlike. And they agree on the most fundamental of truths, that it is that same Divine love which is the last reality of the universe, the eternal truth of who and what God is. 

"All shall be well is therefore a cry of the heart, but of the heart that has been broken by sin and suffering, and is now remade in hope of a New Creation. Julian writes in graphic detail about the lacerated head of the crucified Christ, the drops of blood on thorns, each one evidence of a love that bears all sin and speaks a love which draws from an everlasting and infinite mercy. 

So the current tapestry which is being stitched around these two texts, the hazelnut and the credo "all shall be well", will try to show the beauty and form of the world, encapsulated in the hazelnut as "all that exists". And all that vast universe of 'all that is', including our own jewel like planet, the size of a hazelnut, is for Julian interwoven with the Passion of God in Christ. The Divine love is redemptive, renewing and restoring, and is traced by a red thread of redemptive love running through and around a God loved Creation. 

A third voice to finish. Maria Von Trapp wrote a number of inspirational books. In one of them she reflected on life as a tapestry. She too sensed that the mystery of life finds its best understanding in the colour red, traceable in the fundaments of the universe, and in our own lives. 

“It will be very interesting one day to follow the pattern of our life as it is spread out like a beautiful tapestry. As long as we live here we see only the reverse side of the weaving, and very often the pattern, with its threads running wildly, doesn't seem to make sense. Some day, however, we shall understand. In looking back over the years we can discover how a red thread goes through the pattern of our life: the Will of God.”

When this tapestry is finished, there will be red thread.

Prayer of Intercession

Our Father, your kingdom come,Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. You have called us in all our life together, to seek first the Kingdom of God and your righteousness.

We pray for our country, this place where we live, and where so much that is important in our shared life is under threat, and we seem to be stuck in a mess of our own making.

Brexit has made us stressed and angry, afraid and divided. We have strong opinions and not enough understanding; we take sides, point fingers of blame, refuse to listen to others and shout all the louder ourselves. God, forgive us.

We pray for our Parliament, and all those we have elected and appointed to represent the interests of our country and our people. Father that is one of our greatest fears – we are starting to choose who are our people. We use words like LEAVE and REMAIN as slogans and insults. We use phrases like ‘enemies of the people’, ‘no surrender’, ‘disaster capitalism’ ‘do or die’ as if we are at war with ourselves.

We pray that you will give wisdom and humility to those who have power; undermine the pride and arrogance that often closes off good ways forward; enable those who speak for us to do so with truth and integrity, and to refuse acceptance of lies as if the truth doesn’t matter.

God of the nations, our country must make far reaching decisions soon. Guide and direct us into the paths of peace; stem the flow of invective and hostility; bring minds together to find understanding and a way ahead that enables justice, the common good, and care for each other. Our continent has known terrible wars, and these past 75 years we have lived peaceably and constructively. Whatever the outcomes of these next weeks, may we find ways of living in friendship as partners rather than as competitors and rivals.

Father, in times of crisis and anxiety your prophets spoke words of comfort and truth. May we hear and obey their words, and make those words our prayers in these next weeks:

In our hearts, and in all places of power and decision-making, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever rolling stream."

In our prayers for ourselves and for all who exercise power on our behalf, may we and they hear your command, "Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."

Eternal God, remind us, because we forget far too easily in the heat of argument and in our determination to get our own way; You have shown every one of us what is good, and what it is that you the Lord requires of us, "to act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God."

Teach us once again as a nation to be a place of welcome and refuge for others; lead us as a people to a new understanding of our place among the nations; bring us to repentance and changed ways; give us hearts less selfish and more generous, less afraid of others and more welcoming to each new stranger; give us minds less angry and more peaceable; show us how to turn down the volume of our own shouting and so to listen more carefully to what others say, and think, and feel; give us courage and wisdom to be impatient with lies and defenders of truth.

Forgive our own part in the divisiveness, by ways we speak, or treat others, or refuse to listen to those we disagree with; forgive the faintness of our light and the lost savour of our salt; make us peacemakers and seekers of justice; fill us with passion for a society where people are safe, where compassion is on the increase, where we learn again the joy of kindness, and in which we walk the way of Jesus with arms open in welcome to the stranger, hands reaching out to the hurting, and feet walking in the narrow ways of loving God and neighbour for Jesus’ sake,

Amen

One of my interests is designing and working tapestry. The theme, choice of colours, mixing of coloured strands, decisions about which stitches to use; the scope for messing it up is quite wide!

So there are times when doing freehand tapestry you realise, "No. That doesn’t work!" The colour isn’t right, or the stitch is wrong, and you've done a lot of them.

You’ve been stitched up! That’s when you need a wee tool called a stitch remover. See the picture. A needle pointed hook with a razor edge that cuts out the mistakes and gives you a chance to try again.

Not so easy though, when in the daily worked tapestry of our lives, we've stitched ourselves up by saying the wrong words, or made embarrassing mistakes, or misjudged someone, or behaved in a way we now regret.

Some things can't be unstitched; but where they can, we should do it. Words like forgiveness, reconciliation, acceptance, kindness, goodwill – they’re all good stitch removers where we made false stitches that don't fit the overall pattern of the life we're trying to lead.

“Blessed are the peacemakers…the merciful…those who hunger and thirst for things to be put right (righteousness)” Words that unstitch our mistakes.

"Put yourself into a relation of indebtedness to some of the great thinkers of the past." So the Free Church of Scotland patriarch, Alexander Whyte, in a commencement lecture to students at New College, Edinburgh in the early years of the 20th Century. He himself was a lifelong student of the Puritan Thomas Goodwin; not only a student but an enthusiast, an apologist for Goodwin as one whose depth and penetration of the theology of grace, Whyte believed, was without a serious rival. 

Sixty years later the Christian philosopher Nels S Ferre advised those who wanted to grow an authentic spirituality and an intellectually honest and resilient faith to choose and master one thinker till they knew that person's thought thoroughly. From then on everything else that is read will be measured against that authority; the person whose thought you have taken time to think through, understand, critique and apply becomes a criterion by which to measure the quality of other writers and thinkers. 

My own experience has been something of a combination of Whyte and Ferre. There are several writers to whom I now return to read and read again; and there are thinkers whose thoughts have kept me thinking, and continue to generate questions and insights; and there are books that will be a permanent presence on the shelves because they are now permanent companions on the way. 

Amongst those few thinkers and writers to whom I have "a relation of indebtedness", and whose theology, worldview and ideas give my own judgement critical ballast, is Julian of Norwich. Her one book has been a source and resource to which I have returned several times in my life since I discovered her in 1974.

The Revelations of Divine Love is a spiritual classic, a devotional masterpiece; but it is also a theologically radical exploration of the Christian understanding of God. That God is love, eternally, definitively, essentially Love, is for Julian no mere Christian truism to be qualified by a safety net of dogmatic constraints on what love can and cannot mean. Her anthropology, soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology are themselves shaped and constrained within the most generous trustfulness and extravagant hopefulness about what God purposes for the entire creation. Julian's view of God walks the tight, high wire between the official teaching of the Church, and what God revealed to her through her vision of the Passion, and her subsequent decades of prayer, contemplation and revision of thought. 

In the past few months, following the death of our daughter Aileen, I have gone back to reading Julian daily, applying her slow and patient thoughtfulness about the love of God to my own heart and mind. When I read those famous outrageously hopeful words, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well", they read differently through the tears. Grief and hope are two utterly different and essentially human dispositions; grief is present suffering which is backward looking to inexplicable and irreplaceable loss. Hope requires a present trustfulness that looks forward, not negating the suffering of grief, but neither allowing such concentrated sadness to claim an ultimate priority over the meaning and purpose of each human life.

Grief by its very nature forces an examination of your life's foundations. If tragedy happens despite all your prayers, what good is praying? If God loves every person as if they were the only one, what about that one who was dearest to us? If all shall be well, what good is that future tense hopefulness to a heart broken right now in the present and for the foreseeable future, and struggling to find any point in whatever further away future is promised? If each human being is precious, unique and created, why do so many of those treasured human masterpieces of God's image,fall outside of that great plan God is supposed to have for all God has made? And especially, why allow the death of that one whose loss we now mourn to the depth of our love for them? 

Reading Julian doesn't answer all these questions; at least not at the level of rational persuasion, or logical argument. Amongst Julian's greatest gifts to those who read and pay attention to her, is the voice of a counsellor who speaks with the wisdom of decades long contemplation on just such questions. That voice is tempered by humility in the face of such desperate questioning; she understands, because she has lived these questions herself. As Rilke advised, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves." Patience is exactly what Julian models, both in her long contemplation of God's revelations to her, and in her willingness to accept that there is much she does not and cannot know. And that is the point at which questions reach the limit of their reach. Grief can co-exist with questions. It is faith and love and hope that enables life to go on without the answers; not because there are no answers, but because the eternal love in which we exist and subsist, historically demonstrated in the passion of Christ, the love of God is revealed as ultimately, finally and completely redemptive. 

And from the time that it was shown, I desired oftentimes to know what was our lord’s meaning And fifteen years after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, saying thus: “What would'st thou know thy lord’s meaning in this thing [the whole revelation]? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to thee? Love. What showed he to thee? Love. Wherefore showed he it to thee? For love. Hold thee therein, thou shalt know more of the same. But thou shalt never know therein other without end.” Thus was I taught that love is our lord’s meaning. 

This year in my study is going to be the year of Julian of Norwich. Every summer I choose a subject to focus on, and spend the year exploring and writing and taking time to listen to what I don't know, or, just as important, to hear again truth I've let slip and slide towards the periphery.

By regularly reading and thinking in company with significant literature there is time for words and ideas to seep into the soil of the mind and the heart. I'm not looking for someone to be an echo of what I already think, but to be a voice that interrupts my self-told narrative, and a friend who, for my own good, would rather speak truth I might not like than simply nod agreement with what I already think I know – and don't! 

Previously I spent regular time over the span of a year reading and thinking and in conversation with such friends as: Abraham Joshua Heschel, Charles Wesley, George Herbert, Thomas Merton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sister Joan Chittister, Psalms and Psalmists, John the Evangelist, Walter Brueggemann, Denise Levertov, R S Thomas and a number of others since I started doing this, which was yonks ago!

I first read Revelations of Divine Love in 1972, on a grey and wet October afternoon, sitting on the top deck, front seat of a double decker bus, crawling slowly up Gilmorehill, heading for a late afternoon tutorial on Moral Philosophy. I've read, studied, prayed, taught (In Hanover, New Hampshire), and written on her masterpiece over all these years. I have a number of editions, including that first one I read in 1972 edited by Clifton Wolters in the Penguin Classics.

That bus journey is still a vivid memory. Looking through the front window, the rain was pouring down, like tears steaming down the glass, distorting the reality outside, yet fluid lenses through which we look at the broken heart of the world, through our tears. What I was reading, written in Medieval Norwich, aimed at creating the same effect in the reader; a telling of the Passion of Jesus, narrated by a woman whose vision of the Crucified would leave stigmata on her heart for the rest of her life. That life would be relatively long, but she was not to know that. Those two days of her vision, experienced in a near death experience of a woman desperately ill in an age of primitive medicine, these two days were 48 hours of physical, psychological and emotional suffering which for Julian replicated in her own anguish, the utter love and tragic Passion of the crucified Christ, pouring out with his life blood, the love of God. What all that would come to mean, after over twenty years of reflection and risky theologising, is told in the book that now bears Julian's name, Revelations of Divine Love.   

This time round, reading Julian's revelations deeply, I want to repeat an experiment I first tried several years ago. That year I was spending time with Paul the Apostle, and his letter to the Colossian Christians. Alongside the study of the Greek text, with regular slow reading through the letter over months, and working through the text using scholarly commentaries, I worked on a tapestry which was a visual representation of the heart of what Paul was writing. I had started with a blank canvas, read Colossians several times, and drew a tough but provisional sketch. 

The new tapestry (photo above) is called "All manner of thing shall be well…" Not much beyond a sketch just now, but I hope it gradually takes on the colours of hopefulness, life, beauty and trust. Once again I want to make connections between reading a written text, and seeking to express the ideas it contains, and the inner responses it evokes, and provokes. The sketch is entirely provisional. From my previous knowledge of Julian and her book I have a sense of what I would like to attempt – but I'm open to whatever nascent ideas I might have at the moment, being revised and even supplanted by whatever arises from the experience of reading and listening to this wise woman whose book is such a rich gift to the Church. To interpret a text using colour, shape, image and texture is itself an art form common in the Medieval church. So, we'll see.  

Standing in the grass lane between two high hedges. On the right, and on the other side of hedge, the 18th Century rose garden. On the left, and over the hedge, is the 17th Century rose garden. Between them, this motorway of manicured grass, and at the intersection, the crossroads of paths, this summer house with neither glass in the windows, nor doors in the frames. It is a building open to whoever wants to enter.

At the end of the path, in both directions there are walls; it is, after all, a walled garden. But in the wall, in the distance, a gate. So not the wall of a fortress, a garden wall, a sheltering wall.

The balance of open and enclosed, the symmetry of windows and doors, produced one of those important moments of insight that demand later reflection.

At the time I felt the aesthetic impact of open doors and windows, a clear inviting path, sheltering walls and high hedges, and an unlocked gate. But I took the photo because the harmony of shape, light and evocative metaphor was demanding more of me than aesthetic appreciation and joy in perceived beauty.

On the warmest, sunniest day of the year so far, enjoying an ancient garden filled with old roses and laid out in the garden geometry of previous centuries, I glimpsed some of the most important metaphors in the moral grammar book.

For walls, read borders. In the current cultural climate in the United Kingdom our current Government is busy constructing and defending legal and administrative guidelines to narrow the gates of entry to our country. At the same time within those walls /borders, policies are developed with the intention of creating a "hostile environment" for illegal immigrants; the problem with this is that an environment is pervasive, inescapable, it is where people live and move and have their being. The hostile environment affects everyone who who has to breathe the cultural air. It means those who rightfully have their home in our midst, have to prove they have a right to live amongst us and to stay here. And the gate is being deliberately narrowed. Hostility is seldom an improvement in a culture's ecology.

That summer house with open doors, and limited space within. The global pressures on people whose lives have become intolerable are not going to recede because we build bigger walls, make the gates increasingly narrow, and make it known there is no welcome here. Openness is an important moral metaphor in my own ethical syntax. Those open doors and windows, and that broad path of tended grass between two high hedges, argue a generosity that contradicts narrow gates and high walls and the whole mindset that sees the 'other' as threat.

The aesthetics of the photo seemed to require appreciation of uninterrupted geometry, symmetry and balance. The only person present, and he is invisible, is the photographer. Would the presence of people 'waste' the picture? Aren't gardens human creations, for human enjoyment, and however beautiful and manicured, don't they remain sterile and incomplete without a human presence? Is there a danger that, in wanting the garden for ourselves, the whole hostile environment mindset is less about controlling borders, and managing immigration, and more an exercise in exclusion of those who are 'other' and 'different' and whose presence is perceived to 'waste the picture'? 

Of course borders are an essential political reality. And yes, immigration must be managed in ways that maintain social stability. The challenge is how to do this in a global, multicultural world going through one of the most disruptive periods in recent human history, especially for people in the less resourced and developed parts of the world.

In the photo one hedge is in shadow, the other in sunlight; earlier that day it was the other way round. Time passes; history is fluid; human experience changes and adapts in the attempt to live together, to build peace and co-operation, to plan a future that includes all of us. There is a quite subtle but ultimately significant difference between optimism and hopefulness, at least as I experience and understand those words.

Optimism is less well founded in reality and human intention than hopefulness. Optimism more easily dissolves into wishful thinking. Hopefulness is more about worldview, mindset and core conviction. For me, as a Christian, I see the world as a place where resurrection happened. In human history, in a garden in the early morning, the life of God blazed out of the bleakest blackness with a Yes that reverberates through space and time, to this day, and tomorrow. John Bell says something like that in his Easter Hymn:

In a garden, just at dawn,
Near the grave of human violence,
The most precious Word of Life
Cleared his throat and ended silence,
For the good of us all.

It is hard to be open to the future if we are closed to people who are other than ourselves. It is impossible to build peace with the materials of a hostile environment. We cannot build a better future with higher walls, narrower gates, and paranoia about who walks into our photos and wastes the harmony and symmetry of our comfort zones. As a follower of Jesus, I remain hopeful, but not passive. There is in Christian hope a note, a tone, of defiance. Christian hope is biased, leaning towards justice, tilted into whatever makes for peace, weighted towards reconciliation as the eternally preferred modus operandi of God in Christ. 

Look at the photo again. The red rose intruding on a scene dominated by greens and white. It is incongruous, out of place, and could easily be edited out. But no. It is there as a protest and a presence, as a reminder and a reason to be hopeful. The flower and colour of love celebrates a world where resurrection happened, where reconciliation is God's categorical imperative, and where the Christian vision culminates in the most inclusive scene of the Bible:

 "I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands." (Rev 7.9)