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Today I've been thinking about teachers and teaching. Yesterday in our worship service here in Aberdeen I was privileged to help celebrate a 60th anniversary of Ordination of someone who 44 years ago was my teacher. We did it in style – we prayed to thank God, we presented a book – his kind of book, and we had cake. Derek Murray taught me in College, and has taught me much ever since. He is a friend, he is a colleague in ministry, but before each of these he was my teacher who helped shape me towards ministry.

My earliest experiences of teachers at school didn't go well. For reasons I've spent a lot of time trying to think through and understand, I never got the best out of school, and school never got the best out of me. By the time I was fifteen I had left school, expelled as someone who had stepped out of line once too often. I was intelligent enough and could have expected to 'get my highers' and take it from there, but somehow never settled, never knew what I wanted or what I wanted it for.

I had several teachers who believed in me, tried to guide me into straight paths, encouraged me to settle down and do the work I was capable of doing well. I didn't listen, and no matter how good a teacher is, in the end you learn when you listen, pay attention, engage and commit, and allow what is learned to become transformative. Somehow I could never work within that necessary discipline. I read voraciously and learned almost by osmosis amongst books. I did well in the subjects I enjoyed; these were not maths, chemistry or physics. Having moved school far too many times due to dad's job, I was in three very different s chools in first year secondary. In science subjects needing a solid foundation in first year, I struggled, and never caught up. 

What turned my life around was my conversion, becoming a Christian. Through an evangelical experience of Christ, along with the commitment of my life to following the way of Christ, came a discovery of new purpose and new reasons to learn to learn. I wanted to be a minister, to follow Jesus and invite and encourage others to do the same. Over a few months that life goal had clarified my plans and brought a focus to time, energy and ability that was entirely new to me, and both exhilarating and frightening. What someone called the 'expulsive power of an opposite affection' had happened to me. I had discovered faith displaced mistrust and anxiety; love replaced some of the affective and emotional handicaps caused by insecurity, the need for approval, low self-esteem; and hope dispelled the negativity of someone who had lost too many opportunities already in a young life, and had no real life plans at age sixteen.

So I went to night school; then further education College; then University followed by Theological College. In all it took 8 years from no O Level Standard Grades to University degree and diploma. And along the way I had many teachers, amongst them my friend who this past week celebrated 60 years of Christian ministry. In those years of catch up I had several teachers who modelled different approaches to learning and teaching. Remembering them now, and thinking about Derek, it's obvious that the good teacher is not a conduit of information, a supermarket of knowledge, or even a facilitator in our mastering of whatever subject.It is something beyond the reach of such superficality. It includes the moulding influence of knowledge that has become personalised wisdom, and the sense of the student that this teacher believes in you and can see what is there that is worth growing and bringing to fruition.

What I therefore came to value in my best teachers was their commitment to asking questions, and refusing to take unreflective, ill-considered, inadequate or even ignorant answers. Good teachers require and therefore inspire curiosity. They model and enable intellectual discipline, provoke and affirm vocational motivation, perform and practice the pursuit of excellence both in learning and in teaching. Some of my best teachers did that, some who weren't so good, it could likely be traced to some deficits in these qualities of the learner-teacher. For that too is the mark of a good teacher, that they are lifelong learners, and set out in teaching others to learn from them, and to create dialogue, conversation, shared exploration, the shared joy in the search and the finding, and companionship on the journey  that is the fellowship of scholarship.

Some of my teachers at College became friends. My Principal was R E O White, who in his retirement and into old age I used to visit several times a year, and was humbled by being invited into the deeper places in his life and his own love affair with learning. We talked Greek Testament, Philosophy of Religion, the changing context for preaching, the novels of Austen (whom he loved), Hardy (whom he admired but disagreed with), Eliot (whom he thought formidable, which is true enough). He had little patience with systematic theology when it became an exercise in rational precision at the expense of spiritual power. Pastoral theology he defined in terms of pastoral care, the theology and practice of ministry as service, care and community sustaining.

Iit was one of the most humbling and satisfying moments of my life when I went to see him to tell him I had been appointed Principal of our College, 25 years after being his student. When he died I was invited to deliver the eulogy on behalf of the College. To be asked to sum up a life of intellectual and spiritual discipleship that had indelibly left its mark on my own development as minister, scholar and Christian, was for me a profound experience of the grace that had invaded my life and brought it to that moment.

Derek Murray became my friend too, and remains one of those special people whose presence is synonymous with blessing in my life. We share a love of church history and of much else in Christian scholarship across the disciplines. For both of us life is inconceivable, or at least impossible of enjoyment, without books, reading, study and the quest for answers and new questions. Occasionally we do a bookshop crawl, a day trip to one or two favourite places. It is a further characteristic of a good teacher that their enthusiasm for a subject is such that student and teacher get caught up in it and the distinctions of role and status disappear as both become learners and teachers of each other. My friendships with these two teachers are amongst the richest strands God has woven into and throughout my life.

I remember my embarrassment, and then the laughter, one morning I took prayers in College with all the students and staff present. I read from Psalm 119, but I somehow overlooked the implications of Psalm 119.99. So this first year student found himself declaring "I have more insight than all my teachers…"  It was ironic then; it is still. I cherish in my memory and still in my present life, the dedication of my teachers, and the gifts they have each been in my life.

After 42 years in ministry myself, perhaps I have earned the right to say what I think the real gift of someone whose ministry just passed the 60 year mark. It is this. The gift to others, selflessly offered, of what the teacher knows, and with this the gift of encouragement to learn, and go on learning. Derek has done that for generations of students, and in serial congregations. And those who know him thank God for those who teach by who they are. And he's still teaching us!

Trees. Doctors are now being encouraged to prescribe them. Patients should make time to walk amongst them. Talk to them. Yes, hug them.

Trees are the ultimate stress buster. They listen and never interrupt. They are always reliably, solidly, dependably, recurringly there.

They have recognisable shape, they are places of shelter, they are nature's original wind instruments.

Walking amongst trees in forests and woods we spend company amongst those who have lived longer than we have. The air we breathe is being filtered and freshened by the breathing of trees.

In the Bible the leaves of the trees clap their hands, the leaves of the tress are for the healing of the nations, No wonder Genesis 2.9 talks of "trees that were pleasing to the eye", even God found trees to be blessing.

As a boy living in the country on various farms I climbed trees, taking risks of life and limb without a second thought. Getting to the top of a tall fir tree was an exercise in perseverance, being scratched on face and hands, and getting that sticky resin on the hands that smelled of disinfectant. Or crawling along a branch above a river until it bent, but never broke.

So trees have always been part of my inner furniture, and the sight of a wood, or a single tree outlined against the sky is quite often enough to restore my soul. Still waters and green pastures do that as well; so no surprise that the doctors are prescribing river walks and country rambles as well. A new alternative medicine called Psalmotherapy.

The trees in these photos stand in a field which, each year, is sown with grain. Every time I pass them they look different against the sky, but I'd recognise their shape anywhere. When my own life gets a bit intense, or too low spirits are bumping along the basement of the heart, I find solace in trees. It is precisely their thereness, and their responsiveness to the seasons and to the weather, that is strangely reassuring when my own inner climate is unsettled by circumstances. I think it's because they are a metaphor for the faithful thereness of God, and for that sound of the breeze playing through branches that is a metaphor in sound for the mysterious movements and energies of the Holy Spirit, the renewing presence and sustaining gift of God in our lives.   

 

Lalique waves glisten
with translucent energy
while tumbling shorewards.

 

 

Waves and stepping stones

gladly welcome each other

above the shoreline.

 

 

Let waves demonstrate

alternative energy

is renewable.

Earlier this week I went beach walking. It was windy, mild and dry. The combination of  a camera, a beach and free time works well for me when I need to clear my head and find my inner location once more. Some other people do the same. I passed several folk on my walk, some spoke, happy to share the enjoyment of wind, waves and sand beneath the feet; some looked away, having come for privacy and with the same need to rediscover inner equilibrium; one or two were there with their dogs, those excuses for exercise, and less demanding than human companions. On a beach dogs don't need much other than enough attention to throw the ball.

My own enjoyment is the odd, childlike interest in the noise of waves and the recurring art forms of water on the tumble, impelled by the immense energy of an ocean; and the fascination with stones washed into shape by the friction of millions of pulls and pushes over miles of sand; and the humbling awareness of those other creatures for whom the sea is their home and I'm a visitor expected to be careful of the space and leave the place the way I found it. Along with such positives, the negatives of plastic and the varied detritus of those who, instead of leaving the place the way they find it, leave their rubbish, like trashing footprints.

I spent a while on Tuesday trying to capture images of the waves in their moments of celebration, their approaching restraint giving way to release of energy and the surrender to landfall and journey's end. Two or three times I stopped to watch turnstones, sandpipers and seagulls, feeding and flying, going about their business of living, and trying to do so in the overwhelming proximity of human beings, those not to be relied upon creatures whose own ways of living threaten us all. Here and there, old bricks, rounded and worn down by the lapidary motions of the sea, now embedded in sand, their inner construction of compressed shale and slate, oil and grit, fused by fire so long ago, and now the fading signatures of buildings long gone.

So the photos on this post are moments captured in time, each of them taken at the transient whim of the observer, a coincidence of external interest in an object, and the inner sense of significance that cannot be articulated, and which may only reveal its secret later. The question, "Why did you take that photo?" can sometimes be difficult to answer. There is the pleasure of the image; but also the significance of the moment. Photography has its own aesthetics, technical skills, human satisfactions and restorative power.

Few photographs taken by the glad amateur are going to make it in a calendar competition. Such perfection of execution and technical know how and required equipment is not what matters to the beach wanderer, the hill walker, the observer of life keen to bring the outside world into friendly dialogue  with the inner moods and moments of the thinking mind, the feeling heart and the spirit in search of who knows what – until it is found. What I mean is best told by a photo.

Amongst the people walking yesterday was a man who smiled briefly, then hunched his jacket closer and walked on. He was well ahead of me when his dog bounded past me – I was busy photographing waves. Think of an alsatian with short legs; or a corgi with long legs and XXL ears. It didn't stop till it reached him. That bond of companionship between them, based on the assumed trust and belonging that had been established by all those previous walks and conversations and food and balls thrown and retrieved. The dog was happy. The man? Well he smiled, but his walk and body language suggested he was busy with his own inner puzzles. He hunched his jacket closer, so perhaps pondering the perplexities that need a counselor on the scale, and with the discretion, of the sea.

The photo is not footprints in the sand. But paw prints. And they are every bit as suggestive as the more famous "Footprints in the Sand". Faithful follower who will find you. Constant companion wanting to be with you. Eager friend glad of the time and glad of your company. A moment of time fixed in an image of life's commitments, illustrating the interdependence that is as much a part of our humanity as our much vaunted autonomy. The man is in the photo, you just have to look carefully, near the top, where waves and wall seem to intersect. No idea where the dog is – but if you follow the paw prints…    

This photograph was a happy accident. At least, I didn't expect or intend to suffuse the path and steps with light. It was the garden path and the kaleidoscope of sunlit green that attracted my attention. But once taken, and I had a chance to look at it I realised it was one of those flukes when direct sunlight hits the lens and suffuses the image with bright rays.

But now that it's there, I found it deeply suggestive of several things. But without thinking much about it, the words of a seldom sung hymn helped me interpret those beams of light, in a garden.The poet William Cowper wrote several of the finest hymns in the English hymn canon. He also wrote some that were unsingable then and are now consigned to old hymn books of several generations ago.

The last time it was in a mainstream British denominational book, to my knowledge, is the 1962 Baptist Hymn Book. It is included in the section titled "Trust in God" The first two lines are "Sometimes a light surprises / the Christian while he sings." The two words that are important in this hymn, and they are clues also to the spirituality and fragile mental health of the poet who wrote them, are the words "sometimes" and "surprise".

All his life Cowper suffered from severe and recurring episodes of melancholia; today we would probably be describing chronic tendency to clinical depression. He could plummet to near suicidal despair, utter desolation and self-rejection. His illness at times attached to the stern Calvist theology to which he doggedly held, at times believing he was not of the elect and was predestined to be lost. His great friend and support was John Newton of Amazing Grace fame. If Cowper tended to self-despair, Newton by contrast was boisterous and confident in the mercy of God and the sufficiency of Christ's grace, that brought him safe thus far and that would lead him home. The friendship of these two Calvinist Christian friends is one of the models of pastoral care and patient compassion.

At times Cowper comforted himself by writing his poetry, and hymns. But he knew the darkness would return; hence that poignant qualifying word sometimes. Not always, not predictably, not even reliably, but "Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings". Cowper knew there were times when he could sing himself out of depression. But not always. Hence only sometimes does a light surprise. Cowper was one of those Christians who learned to live with painful ambiguity, without constant assurance of salvation, and with a deep anxiety which added layers of darkness to a spirit already benighted.

And yet. The thing is, like that photograph, he sometimes discovered the warmth and radiance of a presence that brought him healing, albeit temporary. I love Cowper the poet, Cowper the depressed Christian, Cowper who like so many who struggle with mental illness, showed amazing courage to keep going when he had little sense of the amazing grace that saved a wretch like him. Cowper is the patron saint of the depressed, and his hymn slowly gathers confidence and trust until we expect it to end in peace – and then the ambiguity returns. Read the hymn now, as the testimony of someone acquainted with the night, and who hangs on in there because "sometimes a light surprises the Christian…."

That fourth verse is a milestone in evangelical spirituality. After all this singing about healing, comfort, cheer, set free, and verse 3 with its echoes of the Sermon on the Mount and the loving provision of the Father; after all this surprising light, the poet is drawn to Habakkuk's darker vision of the wilderness in which vine and fig will not bear fruit, there will be no sheep, no olive trees nor fields producing fruit, and once again you sense disaster. Except for one word, the first word of verse 4 lifted exactly from the King James Version. Though. Though now our world is as bleak and barren as it gets, and all the obvious human resources have failed. Though it looks hopeless – yet God. Read it for yourself – the testimony of someone singing himself back to faith and to health. And no it didn't always work. But Cowper understood the dynamics of music therapy

1 Sometimes a light surprises
the Christian while he sings;
it is the Lord who rises
with healing in His wings;
when comforts are declining,
He grants the soul again
a season of clear shining,
to cheer it after rain.

2 In holy contemplation,
we sweetly then pursue
the theme of God’s salvation,
and find it ever new.
Set free from present sorrow,
we cheerfully can say,
“E'en let the unknown morrow
bring with it what it may.”

3 "It can bring with it nothing,
but He will bear us through;
who gives the lilies clothing
will clothe His people, too;
beneath the spreading heavens
no creature but is fed;
and He who feeds the ravens
will give His children bread."

4 Though vine nor fig tree neither
their wonted fruit should bear,
though all the field should wither,
nor flocks nor herds be there,
yet God the same abiding,
His praise shall tune my voice;
for while in Him confiding,
I cannot but rejoice.

Seven Reasons to Read this Novel

1 Gail Godwin never writes a bad novel. Some writers become established and it seems the publisher wants a regular flow of new work. The result is that every now and then I've been disappointeds. Anne Tyler and Salley Vickers are two examples of writers who sometimes have left me disappointed, though that's because at their best they are so very good. Godwin is not a novel a year writer, and some of her best were a long time in gestation. Grief Cottage is by Godwin standards, and in my judgement, a 7 out of 10 novel.

2 The title could be a turn off, the novel equivalent of the tragic lives genre of biography and autobiography. But no. This is a book woven around mystery, friendship across generations, the story of a young boy's view of a world that can be both tragic and magic. The title indicates the emotional range of the novel – but remember, grief when it is lived through in the richness of life and in the orbit of affirming relationships, is a process pulling the grieving towards the freedom to live again. This is not a denial of loss, anguish and heartbreak, it is an exploration of how these change the people we are.

3 The characters are drawn and developed throughout the story and they contribute to the novel as people with their own stories, and their personal and private history of grief  and its afterlife in their lives. Each of the main characters is a human being living with the inner conflicts, complex motives, emotional hungers, need for the assuaging of loneliness, and the joys of embracing and being embraced by those who care; and in that complex nexus of human experience, they help to shape each others' future by helping them deal with the past.

4 The plot is both credible and incredible, depending on how you read the story, which in turn depends on the expectations and assumptions the reader brings. There is an element of the supernatural, or at least the paranormal. But as the story unfolds within the mind and reminisncences of the young boy who is the main protagonist, the reader begins to realise that in the mental and emotional distress of grief, all kinds of experiences can seem real. And perhaps they are. But how can you know? There are psychological ghosts that haunt us with remorse, loss, anxiety and our desperate need of a self we can live with.

5 This is a novel about hurt and healing, about suppressed memories that hurt us and the struggle to expose them and find some sort of healing in the coming to terms. Each person in this story has their wounds, and one or two of them are wounds that need cleansing and rebinding, a process not without pain but with the promise of being able to live more fully, less fearfully, and with a hope of contentment or at least resolution. It is the kind of book people who care for others should read.

6 Scotland's First Minister is an avid reader of novels and an evangelist about the importance of novels as a way of widening experience, pushing back personal limnited horizons and creating empathy in situations the reader hasn't previously encountered or experienced. This is exactly that kind of novel. Without ever aiming at being didactic, Godwin writes with psychological precision and emotional wisdom about sorrow and recovery, loss and new gains, friendships that last and some that don't, about human love and how it ebbs and flows but at its best is constant and capable of the miracle of faithfulness.

7 In her Memoirs of a Writer, Godwin notes of someone else: "“When I was in seminary," Father Edward had told other guests around the table when he was purchasing his books, "my spiritual director told me not to read theology. 'Read novels,' he said, and I have.” Preachers and pastors, counsellors and chaplains, carers and indeed everyone who seeks to bring the riches of their own emotional, mental and spiritual lives into their ways of relating to and living amongst other people, will find the well told story a constant supply of insight, emotional intelligence, and spiritual direction and redirection. I have always known for myself that sustaining the life of the imagination is one of the prime directives of responsible Christian thought and action. Novels allow us to imagine situations we could never experience; to rehearse our responses to the joy and hurt, hope and despair, achievement and disappointment in the lives of other people and communities. By those criteria, Grief Cottage is a comfortable 7 out of 10. Well worth the reading.

Wave washed pebbles are amongst my desultory enthusiasms. Desultory because to enjoy and fully appreciate a pebble beach you need time, slowed down pace, attentiveness and a significant level of unstructured and undirected meandering. You also need the background rattling and chattering of stones shaping each other by the endless rhythmic friction of waves and tidal currents.

Enthusiasm because it requires time and effort, and a willingness to go looking for the joy of seeing what no one has ever seen before, and realising, that no one will ever see it again. That particular arrangement of stones and pebbles, in this particular light, at this particular moment, feeling as I do gazing and seeing what is there, is unique and unrepeatable in it configuration of time, circumstance, climate and the inner mood of the observer.

Recently I've taken to photographing the changing micro-geography of a pebble beach being rearranged by the brushing and pushing of the waves. The dancing of sunlight and shadow, the highlighted colours and tones, the diversity of shape and size, create an infinite range of possibilities. And yes, that moment can be captured, but only partially, by a digital camera. Still there is in the photo the fixing of an image of a moment, which can be revisited and contemplated.

On any one beach there are milions of stones, from rocks to boulders to pebbles, a geological kaleidoscope that has been millions of years in the making. And into that long story of time and movement, steps a man with a camera, and freeze frames a micro-second which he later ponders and studies in order to awaken wonder, and perhaps prayer.

Contemplative prayer is likewise a moment of eternity paid attention to. Over a lifetime, millions of thoughts and experiences, retained in memory, forgotten, or suppressed, become part of the person we are aware of ourselves being. Like the infinite possibilities and endless configurations of pebbles moved and placed, moved and replaced, arranged and rearranged by the rhythms of waves, tides and seasons, there is an equivalent movement in the inner motions of heart and mind on the shoreline of our own peculiar spirituality.

I've written before about the spirituality that gives focus to the attentive looking of the photographer. Whether landscape or rose, seascape or lichen, bird in flight or comvine harvester, human artefact or nature's masterpieces, streets with cars or a loch populated by geese, what we choose to see matters. My recent enthusiasm for photographing stones is one more way of awakening wonder at the times and circumstances of my own life. Contemplating those mysterious movements of the waves, shifting and rearranging pebbles and stones, that wonder becomes also a deeper wondering about the forces that have shaped me, and placed me where I now am.

Perhaps meandering on the beach with a camera is the outward activity of an inner urgency, seeking to understand the mystery of a human life, my life, as it is confirgured and reconfigured in ways I don't always plan, and wouldn't necessarily choose. Perhaps too, the life of faith is about taking time to contemplate, pray, and seek to understand and appreciate that particular arrangement of time and circumstance that is my life now, and to be grateful that out of the infinite possibilities of existence, I am still here.

I don't think of God as the great arranger and rearranger of my life as if my own decisions, responses, loves and hopes could simply be over-ridden by a well meaning providence.The love that moves the sun and other stars is a love that in the relationship of love, holds all that he has made within a purpose that is liberating, redemptive, renewing and into which in Christ God has entered as life-giver. Whatever the outcomes of life, whatever the changing arrangements of the pebbles on the beach, "He who did not spare his own Son, but freely gave him up for us all, will he not, with him, graciously and freely give us all things." I have no idea what those "all things" will look like – but I trust the waves and tides and seasons to shape and place me, finally, within the eternal love that gave me life in the first place.

I have found the past week hard going. As soon as I think about it there are several obvious reasons, to do with life circumstances, family, work, and my own inner climate. On reflection it's the last of these that troubles me most. Weather is an interesting metaphor for mood. Weather is changeable, varied, and something we either hide from or revel in. Weather can seem hostile or comforting, and as Jesus said about the night breeze, you know not where it comes from or where it's going. Not even our satellite and computer enhanced meteorology guarantees predictability.

This week my inner climate has been seriously affected by trying to think, pray and understand what is happening in our world, in our country, and particularly to the community of nations that make up the North Atlantic continents, east and west. Much of my musing and fretting, thinking and praying, emotion and thoughfulness, found a focus on what has been happening in the US with the almighty tug of war over the nomination to the Supreme Court.

I have a wide circle of friends, diverse, informed, responsible and on both sides of the main political divides, both in the UK and the US. I also have friends in the EU who are bemused, hurt and anxious about our future post Brexit – but that's another story. For now I have been trying to think and pray my way through the unfolding drama that is American partisan politics at its most nakedly hostile. How has it come to the point where a woman's testimony to what happened to her as a teenager becomes world news? How does her account and memory of sexual abuse as a teenage girl take on a political significance of such magnitude that her pain becomes secondary and her allegations become weaponised by both parties?

There are watershed moments in the decline of a culture. In the immediacy of live streaming, social media and a digital culture fixated on screens we have become used to the jaw dropping spectacle. We understand the clickbait habit that is all but irresistible. But the images and sounds from the Senate Committee hearing last week, live streaming those two testimonies, have a significance far deeper and reverberations far more perilous than the latest celebrity scandal, political crisis or Trump tweet. There are moments when we sense a loss of control, the extinguishing of a standard, the erasure of a mutually agreed line of decency, and with it we come to terms with a further diminishment of our moral capital. At such times we depend on moral leadership, we listen for voices of reason, we wait for that intervention which rehumanises a process rapidly becoming negligent of the categorical imperative that seeks the good, and the true and the just. It never came.

Cultural integrity plummeted further when the President of the United States engaged in a public mockery of the woman who had testified before the Senate Committee. Not so much a watershed, more a cataract of indecency unparalleled in modern Western political rhetoric and public discourse. The man elected to protect each United States citizen, and in whom is invested the authority of law and who embodies a Constitution which is the basis of justice, mocked, humiliated, diminished and bullied someone who the day before testified to the Senate Committee. She was entitled to his protection; instead she was baited, ridiculed and denied the basic right of being treated with respect. 

When I speak of my inner climate, and how hard the past week has been, it's come about by seeing the gathering of dark clouds of abusive power, moral disregard, mockery of judicial process, orchestrated hatred, and once again a powerful man enjoys humiliating a woman in public. These are the rumbles on the horizon, the first flashes of a storm that unleashes forces beyond the usual controls of moral constraint, public decency and secure institutions which hold power accountable. Something unprecedented happened when Trump became cheerleader against a woman who claims she is a victim of sexual abuse.

Part of my anguish, and that word I seldom use self-referentially, is that amongst those cheering this President are those who claim to know and follow Jesus. I don't understand this. I've tried, but I'm stuck. So here's another voice worth introducing to the conversation.

I'm currently immersed in Paul's letter to the Galatians. Now Paul also knows a thing or two about rhetoric, argument and persuasion. And he knows how to fight. But to Christians who support Trump and who will not call him out on that misogynistic rant the other night, Paul has some words that are worth their long pondering: "Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit…for the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature." (Gal 5.25,17

A Christian's loyalty is to Christ as Lord, first, foremost and finally. Whatever our political affiliation, however committed to a party and its policies and personalities, a Christian will always count such commitments as secondary, provisional and temporary. Seeking first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness is a Christian's primary and permanent commitment. For Christians Jesus is Lord, and that Lordship is total. "I am crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me." (Gal 2,20)

So here is my question: How can a Christian, living by the command to walk in the Spirit who is the Spirit of holiness, and claiming "Christ crucified lives in me", hear the public mockery and humiliation of a woman who testified under oath to being sexually abused, and approve, or worse still, be silent? Because whatever else the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about, it is about not being conformed to this world; it's about love trumping hate; it's about mercy if we ever expect to be shown mercy; it's about living in ways so reminiscent of Jesus that our loyalties are unmistakable.

The support of evangelicals for Donald Trump is a complex phenomenon, and one I've written about before. But even if there are defensible grounds for evangelicals supporting Donald Trump as the lesser of two evils, an argument many evangelicals offer, that can never justify approval or silence about the behaviour of Donald Trump this past week. The public mockery of a woman by the American President, at a Republican rally, a woman who saw it as her civic duty to tell her story of alleged sexual abuse, and to do so under oath, and under the sworn protection of the Senate Committee, was an abuse of power, and a watershed moment in the decline of decency at the heart of American government. But for Evangelical Christians who voted for him, it was more than that. It's a moment of moral decision about who is Lord in a Christian's life. I can think of no circumstance whatever, in which Jesus would urge his followers to ignore, or be silent about such baying ugliness.

And just to be clear. Both parties weaponised this woman's pain, and the accused man's pain. Both [parties contributed to that watershed moment of cultural disgrace, and added impetus to that rapid downhill race to the bottom. The problem with going fast down the Gadarene slopes, is that it is so hard to stop, and even harder to push back up to where we started from.

Dr Sheila Cassidy is one of my heroes. I read her autobiography, Audacity to Believe in the late 1970s. Her account of her torture by the DINA, the Chilean secret police under Pinochet, was harrowing and told with honesty about the terror and loneliness of those months. Her crime was that, as a medical doctor, she treated a revolutionary activist. On her return to the UK she eventually returned to medicine becoming the Medical Director of St Luke's Hospice in Plymouth. During those years she wrote several books which remain important documents about the interface of faith and suffering, and the interface of human beings helping each other through the hardest miles of their journey.

In that earlier book, Audacity to Believe, she tells of her confusion and inner searching. She wasn't looking for answers. She was looking for direction, purpose and meaning. There is a wonderful afternoon when she is recovering, and sitting in the middle of a park, on top of a pile of leaves, with a layer of leaves all around. This, she says, was to prevent anyone approaching her unnoticed, because she wanted to pray, that is, to have a straight heart- exposed, everything out in the open talk with God. She senses God was asking her for commitment; not a commitment, but the commitment of her life, the kind of surrender in which all other commitments are handed over to God. The image that formed in her mind was of a blank cheque. She should sign it and hand it over. It took a long time of arguing until, within her heart, she signed the blank cheque, handed it over, and invited God to fill in the cost.

It is a remarkable passage of writing, an account of authentic spiritual encounter, when an ordinary day becomes pivotal, and all that came before and comes afterwards is interpreted in the light of that single irrevocable yes. In the hard work of discernment, that process of self-examination and imaginative receptiveness to life's possibilities, there comes a time of decision, and risk. When Jesus said, Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things will be yours also", that wasn't a promise we would get everything we wanted. It was a promise that in seeking first of all God's rule in our lives, all other wants become ordered, secondary and means to the chosen end, obedience to God. 

Cassidy's life has not been easy or straightforward since those earlier years. In her two books Sharing the Darkness and Good Friday People, she explains her sympathy with human suffering, her commitment to healing, and describes her professional involvement in alleviating the pain and grief of others. Accompanying the dying, and intentionally and selflessly sharing the darkness with those who "walk through the valley of the shadow of death", takes its toll. That blank cheque proved to incur a lifetime of self-expenditure. In one chapter she tells about the inner life of the doctor, the one whose calling is to offer pallliative care, and to do so not only through the pharmacological miracles of modern pain control, but through personal investment in companionship, shared anguish and serial loss. One way of coping was to look for the sign of the cross in the everyday environments she inhabited – in the hopsice, her home, on the commute, wherever she had to time and energy to pay attention.

The cross is the place where all human anguish and loss intersects with a Love that is eternal, infinitely self-giving, and inclusive in its embrace of every sufferer. The cruciform image has, for that reason, become an important symbol that gives structure and cogency to hope. If God loves like that, and if such suffering can be redemptive; and if on the cross love overcomes hate and, in the end, death is eclipsed by life, then there awaits beyond the tragedy and loss of human suffering, a mystery that evades our capture, but which reaches to the very depths of all that gives us being.

Though she does not quote the words, Cassidy's life work, from Chile to Plymouth and further still, has been an experiemntal, at times unwitting, living out of the truth embedded in the words of the philosopher theologian who wrote the Letter to the Hebrews:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. (4.15-16)

In ways beyond our knowing, the Crucified God enters the darkness and refuses to leave without us. To receive mercy, and to find grace, is to discover the real, eternal, and final meaning of the cross. There are times when mercy and grace are mediated to us through the lovingkindness, faithful patience, and costly compassion of others. Somewhere, sometime, in their lives, they too handed over a blank cheque.

There is a poignant, and realistic footnote in Cassidy's telling of that day in the park. She tells of how, often, she took back the cheque she signed, '"from the hands that held it so lightly", tore it up and threw it in the rubbish bin. And how, each time, she took the pieces, "taped them together, signed it once more, and handed it back, stained with tears and grubby, but still valid." I know of few pieces of spiritual writing that capture more precisely the oscillation of obedience and self-will in the heart of any of us who desire to serve God so faithfully, and fail so often.

The photo is of a mirror in one of our favourite cafes. The cruciform image surrounded by mirrors means that to stand in front of it is to see yourself in the light of the cross, and to see the cross intersecting with all of life around us, and including our own. Cassidy's habit of looking for that image of cruciformity has become for me a form of theological reflection. Such thinking has multiple starting points, each of which leads back eventually to the central truth of who and what God is. Each one of us journeys through times and places of darkness. Such experiences change us, expose our weakness and our very great need to "receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need"The cross is the place where that happened once and for all, and still happens today.

The following prayer was written to enable congregational response to a sermon on the Tenth Commandment, "Thou shalt nor covet." It interacts with these words of James chapter 4.1-3

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? ² You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. ³ When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

PRAYER

Lord Jesus, you did not covet the highest place or desire the biggest name

Instead for love’s sake you gave up position and reputation.

R. Teach us to covet that same loving obedience and to desire your “Well done”.

 

Lord Jesus, wherever you went you brought hope and a new future

Feeding the hungry, healing the broken, embracing the stranger.

R. Teach us to covet hope for others, and to desire the gift of hope-building.

 

Lord Jesus, you went about doing good, and giving yourself for others,

Living and giving as the embodied love of God.

R. Teach us to covet generosity, and to desire the gift of giving ourselves away.

 

Lord Jesus you came as God’s peacemaker and reconciler,

Teaching forgiveness, bearing sin, rebuilding ruined relationships.

R. Teach us to covet a forgiving spirit, and to desire the ways of peace.

 

Lord Jesus your food was to do the will of God, always and everywhere,

Telling and showing the ways and the cost of the kingdom of God.

R. Teach us to covet a willing obedience, and to desire your will, done on earth.

 

Lord Jesus you are the Bread of Life and the Living Water,

You nourish our hungry souls and refresh our thirsty hearts.

R. Teach us to covet the daily bread of faithful obedience to your call,

    And to desire the living water of your Spirit, springing up to eternal life.