Living Wittily

Broccoli, growing older and globalisation

Broccoli is good for one, so I am told. So like medicine I take it sometimes cos it's good for one.

That's probably why the elderly pensioner I met at the vegetable counter in our local supermarket was looking to buy some, but grimacing at the price. She had a broccoli head in her hand, and was wringing away at the long thick stalk, trying to break an inch or two off, her face still a grimace of frustration. I would have offered to help, because I thought myself the stalks were too long, and the purplish green floret head too small. Half the weight was in the part you throw away. What's more, I thought, if broccoli is shipped from Spain should it not be mainly the edible part that's transported and thus responsible for the carbon footprint? In any case, as my senior friend was discovering, the stalk was bendy and lacking in that crispness that is a sign of fresh harvesting - and would have made it easier to break!

Made me think about globalisation and growing older. A conversation with another senior citizen (I like that term, especially if it preserves a non-patronising respect for age, and acknowledges affectionately the value of cumulative wisdom and years of human experience) - this other senior citizen was pointing out that her favourite butter spread, Lurpak, has rocketed in price, (30%) as has milk and bread because, as she informed me, there is a global grain shortage. Indeed there is - and for many older people, and others on fixed or low incomes, such price fluctuations compel hard choices. In a society where disposable income is high amongst the haves, maybe globalisation is a blessing all but unmixed.

But disposable income, that income buffer-zone that absorbs price variations with minimal disruption to quality of life, is all but extinct amongst the have-nots. So limited and fixed income can make a significant difference to quality of life, erode morale and a sense of independence and personal hopefulness, and undermine the confidence that ordinary things are still affordable. I've little patience for those retail emotional health bulletins that agonise over consumer confidence. They are not ususally referring to the pensioner who can't now afford Lurpak, or who wants to break the neck of the nearest broccoli head.

So I have great sympathy with my elderly shopping colleague, and her covert assault on a bendy broccoli stem with a too heavy carbon footprint. Would it have been an act of prophetic protest and solidarity with the poor to snap off the unwanted chunk of broccoli stalk for her? Or should I have waited at the check-out and paid for an extra one and given it to her, making sure the manager knew what was going on and why?

I did neither, and I regret that.

The politics of assassination and the politics of peace

The murder of Benazir Bhutto, and its aftermath of escalating casualties, is yet another atrocity visited on a world where exponents of terrorism, political enmity and religious hatred, ruthlessly use the publicity value of random lethal violence. No political or religious goals can escape the searching scrutiny of human beings applying human values to that inhuman moral nihilism that not only sees human lives as dispensable, but considers the inflicted death of others an acceptable means to a desired end. I have no moral calculus that enables me to work out whatever mad logic or rogue religious devotion triggers such destructive hatred.

Yet nothing I can write here, nor the familiar rhetoric of outrage and appalled condemnation from politicians, is likely to influence whatever powerfully corrosive forces fuel such outbursts of death-dealing animus. What I can do though, is take time to think and pray, to weigh carefully and consider contemplatively, how the Body of Christ can articulate the love of God, demonstrate the peace of the Gospel hopefully, embody the ministry of reconciliation practically, and give credible expression to the sorrow of the Crucified God who bears the infinite cost of redeeming humanity from our self-destructive ways.

'Make me a channel of your peace, where there is hatred let me bring your love......' That I think, is the kind of New Year resolution that will take grace to keep.

Kyrie Eleison

Christe Eleison

Kyrie Eleison

The Church of Jesus Christ and the territorial imperative

A retrograde step for ecumenism.

A scene reminscent of The Life of Brian.

An illustration of religious devotion carried too far.

A new approach to church cleaning.

A sign that when it comes to loving and following Jesus, the church still doesn't "get it".

An alternative approach to spiritual warfare.

Or just one more reason why a Gospel of peace and reconciliation lacks credibility in an age long past skepticism and cosily habituated to cynicism.

The story is carried by AOL. Judge for yourself - then perhaps find time to pray.....

Priests Fight at the Site of Christ's Birth

Broom-wielding priests fought each other at the site of Christ's birth after rows broke out between rival factions as they arrived to clean the shrine.

The robed Greek Orthodox and Armenians clashed inside Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity.

The basilica, built over the grotto where Christians believe Jesus was born, is administered jointly by Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic authorities. Any perceived encroachment on one group's area can lead to vicious feuds.

Dozens of priests and cleaners went to the fortress-like church to scrub and sweep the floors, walls and rafters ahead of the Armenian and Orthodox Christmas, celebrated in the first week of January.

But the cleaning session turned ugly after some of the Orthodox faithful stepped inside the Armenian church's section, setting off a scuffle between about 50 Greek Orthodox and 30 Armenians.

Palestinian police, armed with batons and shields, quickly formed a human cordon to separate the two sides so the cleaning could continue.

...compassion and ethically galvanised sorrow for the state of the world

Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain is a flawed masterpiece of spiritual autobiography. But frankly, any spiritual autobiography that isn't flawed isn't much good to those of us who, flawed as we are ourselves, are looking for companions in realism, guides who even if they know the road better than we do, still find it hard to follow. What makes Merton's self-told story both fascinating and moving, is that it was written by a young man who, in later life, regretted some of the faults in his book that others were quick enough to point out to him.

With distance it's obvious, at times embarrassingly obvious, that the book is marred by the triumphalism of pre Vatican II Roman Catholicism and by Merton's dismissiveness, even caricature, of other Christian traditions.

And then also, at times Merton's memories of his own sinfulness get him entangled in explaining the machinations and intricacies of his guilt-laden conscience to his readers, but only succeeding in a less than authentic moralising and self-despising, which is hindsight at its least helpful as it hints at a still uncompleted sense of renewal through forgiveness.

And his earlier separation of sacred and secular amounted to a practical dualism, a separation of life into categories of holiness that he later did much to oppose. Some of his best later writing provides important guidance on how to live a whole life in which such categories dissolve into a reconciled worldview, a balanced lifestyle and an openly generous spirituality that is alert to the presence and activity of God in all things. It's this later Merton I most value, before his fascination with Eastern faith traditions pushed him towards much less orthodox interests.

But reading this book again over Christmas my respect and affection for Merton is undiminished. Because with all its flaws it is a book that tackles the big question of our life's meaning, of whether life is driven by a sense of the rights and selfishnesses of the sovereign fragemented self, or whether life's purpose is to be discovered in response to God's call to lose ourselves in self-surrender to the sovereign love and severe mercy of the one in whose gift is our life, and in whose healing is our wholeness. I am a Baptist, not a Trappist; yet I sense a kindred spirit in Merton, one who knows as I know myself, that the call of God is both sovereign command and self-giving love. And that in our encounter with Christ we touch the deepest reality of all, the Reality that not only enables us to be, but wills our being, eternally, redemptively, entirely, and wills our being for no other reason than love for us, and for the whole creation that awaits its redemption.

The fact that Merton's was a monastic vocation in the middle years of the 20th Century does nothing to reduce the relevance and very great importance of his insights into the disfigurements and diseases of 21st century existence. Indeed he believed that as a contemplative holding the world in his heart before God, he was called to see clearly, to speak courageously and to act prophetically on behalf of peace and humanity. And this is possible at all because it is the contemplative who takes time to see below the surface of things, to view the world from a spiritual standpoint, to develop and nurture resources of compassion and ethically galvanised sorrow for the state of the world.

As an Evangelical, I am aware of the deep resources of intentional silence, thoughtful solitude, contemplative and compassionate reflection, which the monastic tradition instils - and of which Evangelicals are often impatient or even suspicious. But in a world that is complex now beyond description, in which ethical choices are reduced to pragmatic options, when huge issues of the human future now need addressing, there is a need for a durable spiritual resourcefulness rooted deep in the Christian tradition. Our churches need to begin forming and nurturing people trained and rooted in contemplative wisdom, communities hungry for a recovery of personal holiness formed through prayer but allied to an ethical agility unafraid of tight-ropes. Globalisation and consumerism, terrorism and militarism, pluralism and polarisation, ecological urgency and theological uncertainty, are some of the oscillating voices of a world confused by its own complexity, and bankrupt by its own profligacy.

The writing and the legacy of Thomas Merton is for me, an important resource, empowering and articulating such politically responsive and spiritually responsible prayerfulness. I know of little in Evangelical spiritual practices which come near to such non-functional contemplative dwelling in the Reality of God so as to challenge pervasive realities such as global consumerism. Somewhere in our missiologically driven activism, there must be found place for contemplative prayer, dwelling deep in the truth and Reality of God, learning patiently to see clearly and act faithfully.

In the coming year, I will offer occasional reminders of Merton's gift for transfusing contemplative prayer and faithful action into a life that is Christian, explicitly and outspokenly, Christian.

Dr Who and Chocolate Gu

I don't usually watch Dr Who, but since our Christmas meal was around our usual tea-time and I needed an interlude between Main Course (which I cooked) and Dessert, I joined the hardened fans in our family and watched the Christmas Special. Glad I was using it more as a mere background context during which to savour and relish and generally appreciate the warm gooey Gu chocolate souffle accompanied by luxury custard, which was entertainmemnt enough and more. In contrast to the rich, life affirming inner glow created by this well conceived coincidence of ingredients, warm soft chocolate and custard you stand a spoon in, the Dr Who episode was an ill conceived coincidence of cliches that did little to divert my attention from the main feature of my early evening, the aforementioned dessert.

Knowing the nutritional information on both the pudding and the custard it would be a bit rich to claim that the dessert did my heart good in any literal, physiological sense. But in the figurative and emotional well-being sense, it did indeed do my heart good; it was deeply comforting, therapeutically life enhancing, and spiritually formative - cos I  now know what it would be wrong to have too much of, and I'm off to knock off twice the number of calories consumed in said dessert on the exercise bike - Oh but it's worth it, every laborious minute sat on the cycle seat..............it is, indeed, worth it!

....stoops heaven to earth....

In an extended poem of mixed quality, is to be found one of the finest theologically centred verses Richard Crashaw ever wrote. The Incarnation lies at the heart of Christian faith. Yet however precisely we formulate theological statements and calibrate doctrinal definitions in order not to say too much or too little; or however much we more humbly take refuge in paradox, and contemplate the mystery of the ages being revealed in the birth of a child; it may be that poets are our best guides, with the gift of imagination both reverent and daring, and using and crafting words less concerned with metaphysical precision than with spiritual comprehension. Doxology, the expression of praise through words which themselves must always be scandalously inadequate because human, are yet deemed worthy of the worship of God and the contemplation of the Divine Love, by none other than the Word made flesh:

Welcome, all Wonders in one sight!
   Eternity shut in a span.
Summer to winter, day in night,
   Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little One! Whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.

Earlier this week marked the tercentary of the birth of Charles Wesley. He wrote many hymns on Christ's nativity, but it is in one of his most famous hymns that he conveys the concentrated focus of God's intention in the Incarnation.

He left his Father's throne above-

So free, so infinite his grace-

Emptied himself of all but love,

and bled for Adam's helpless race.

'Tis mercy all, immense and free;

For, O my God, it found out me

Later this morning we will go to Choral Communion at the historic Paisley Abbey. I think a Choral Christmas Communion is one of those liturgical occasions when worship arises from the heart, almost against our will. Or at least thought and feeling, memory and intention, joyful Advent and remembered Easter, draw the soul upwards, wondering and mystified by a God whose love coalesces in the humility of Incarnation and the humiliation of Atonement, and yet, because we know how the story ends, humble redeeming love triumphs in reconciliation, resurrection and new creation.

Charles Wesley again:

Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace,

Hail the Sun of righteousness;

light and life to all he brings

risen with healing in his wings:

mild he lays his glory by

born that we no more may die

born to raise us from the earth

born to give us second birth:

Hark the herald angels sing

Glory to the new-born King.

Glory indeed!

As those embarrassed people say at the moment of their sudden fame, I'd just like to say hello to everyone who knows me! and have a Joyful Christmas!

Tradition and Sausage Rolls

Every family has its traditions, and Christmas is one of the best times to have them. One of ours is about home made sausage rolls for our Christmas Eve savoury supper around midnight. Now sausage rolls can represent the lower end of the gastronomic food chain. We've all been at those functions where you're not sure if it's wise to actually eat the grey paste encountered under a tube of glutty pastry. Or we may even have bought those solid little wodges of amorphous protein wrapped in a blanket of flaky but elasticated dough, purchased in bulk from the various supermarkets, and wondered afterwards if these sad objects closely or remotely resemble what any of us envisages by the term sausage roll. Now to avoid ambiguity, I don't mean a sausage ( flat or round or link) in a roll / bap - a kind of burger or hot dog kind of thing. No. Not that.

I mean a sausage roll, real sausage meat, mixed with bacon, herbs, mustard, Worcester sauce and spices, wrapped in puff pastry, cut into medallions and brushed with egg-yolk, and cooked for 45 minutes in the oven until the house is pervaded by the smell of cooked bacon, mustard and herbs de provencale, and the inhabitants are queueing up at the kitchen waiting for the oven beeper to beep. Ours is one of the few places I know where serving sausage rolls requires mild forms of crowd control!

In keeping with tradition - I'm away to make the sausage rolls, which we'll cook later. And if we can work the technology, I'll even post a picture of what REAL sausage rolls look like. Can't show you what they taste like though - typepad doesn't do smells yet.

More seriously, and equally joyfully, a very happy Christmas to all those who make a habit of coming past this blog, and to those who happen by over Christmas. May you know the peace of God, the love of Christ and the renewing life of the Holy Spirit. And may our world be touched again by the Advent God who comes to us as Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father and Prince of Peace. Emmanuel - God with us.

"...the hospitable hearted, spiritually exercised Evangelical..."

'Get yourselves into a relation of indebtedness to some of the great writers of the present and the past.....' The advice of Principal Alexander Whyte to New College Students, in a lecture on Thomas Goodwin, a Premier League Puritan, later published in Thirteen Appreciations. I am an admirer of Alexander Whyte for many reasons, though well aware he may be too Victorian for some tastes; psychological moralism, occasions when sentiment and scolding get in the way of persuasive insight, and all the time his fascination, in almost equal terms, with both sin and grace.

But at his best Whyte has the dazzling, glimmering presence of Scheihallion, (his favourite Scottish mountain) covered in snow. In his sentimentality there isn't a whiff of insincerity, and in his scolding there is the unmistakable solidarity of pastor with people, of scolder with scolded. And one of the main reasons I admire this Victorian Free Kirk preacher, is because he explains why I have long valued the writings of the most famous 20th century Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. And if you think a Free Kirk minister, who was Moderator of his church, who was Principal of its most influential College, and who for decades filled the pulpit of the Free Church's most influential Edinburgh church, might raise a hoary eyebrow at a Baptist minister who is also Principal of a Denominational College claiming his support for such a reason - you'd be wrong and you'd be surprised.

In the volume referred to Alexander Whyte wrote appreciations of thirteen Christian writers. As a Scottish Presbyterian Calvinist you'd expect Samuel Rutherford and William Guthrie the Fenwick Covenanter, and the New England Puritan Thomas Sheppard, to be 'appreciated'. And Thomas Goodwin the Puritan was Whyte's theological and spiritual mentor-in print - he read Goodwin so much the books had to be rebound in leather to withstand the wear and tear of a reader who lugged such tomes around with him while on holiday in the Highlands. But Whyte's appreciation reached much further afield - he wrote one of the most penetrating reviews of the sermons of Cardinal John Henry Newman, and as a younger man visited this celebrated Roman Catholic Convert at the oratory in Birmingham. His appreciation of Teresa of Avila was reviewed in The Tablet and read in religious communities as the lunchtime sacred reading. His review of father John of Kronstadt took him into the Russian Orthodox tradition where he sensed the importance of bowing to mystery, gazing on the beauty of holiness and lifting the heart in passionate and unembarrassed devotion to God.

So what's the connection between Alexander Whyte and my appreciation of Thomas Merton? Quite simple - Whyte urged those who would preach and pastor others to be a "true Catholic...a well read, open-minded, hospitable hearted, spiritually exercised Evangelical", and to be "in a relation of indebtedness" to those who on the journey with God are further down the road than I will ever be. At many important turns in my own journey, Merton has been one of those who knew the road better than me. As a guide he has helped me map some of my own inner geography, that changing landscape of the soul where psychology, spirituality and the reality of God provide the raw material of my own humanity in Christ. Over many years few writers have taught me better than Merton, the importance of knowing myself known, loved and called by God, to serve Him open of mind and heart to the truth and the presence of God in all of life.

Whyte understood as few others in his age did, the damage done to the Gospel of Jesus, the mission of the church, and our personal spiritual development, by misguided and exclusive loyalty to the one narrow strand of the Christian tradition to which any of us happens to belong. Evangelicalism has been a tradition that, perhaps as a defensive buffer zone, developed strands of intolerance, its own list of no go theological areas and traditions, its in-built hermeneutic of suspicion that simply does not trust other traditions to be as 'sound', as 'biblical', in their understanding, interpretation and living of the truth of Christ. My own heart has never settled for such exclusiveness. Instead, like Alexander Whyte, A W Tozer, Thomas Goodwin, John Wesley, Richard Baxter and many, many others who stand either in Evangelicalism, or in the earlier traditions from which it emerged, I have put myself 'in a relation of indebtedness' to great souls of the Christian tradition, and been taught so much by those guests I have made welcome companions on my own journey.

This Baptist then, has learned a lot I needed to know about loving God without pretence, from Merton the Trappist. But I've also learned how not to limit the range and depth of the love of God in Christ from the medieval Julian of Norwich and the Methodist Charles Wesley. The studied devotional precision of Anglican George Herbert, the astringent but healthy questioning of the Welsh priest R S Thomas, the verbal virtuosity in service of spiritual certainty and uncertainty of the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, continue to teach me the importance of words in conversation about God, more especially in conversation with God. But these are other stories, for other times.

For now, over Christmas, I'm re-reading The Seven Storey Mountain, surely one of the 20th Century's genuine spiritual classics. Not least because it is a frank, flawed and distilled account of spiritual emptiness and hunger, and of the remorseless mercy that pursues us with gracious and loving intent.

A year ago today - in memoriam.

A while ago I posted a photo of my father lying  in front of our farm cottage, resting with our working collie, before going to do the evening milking. It's a year ago today since my mother died. I don't mark this day as an expression of sadness, but as a day of thankfulness. The obvious self-interested gratitude of a son to the one who gave him life - but  gratitude also that in my mother I was given a remarkable gift.

In a culture that has grown used to benchmarks as standards of quality, she benchmarked several human qualities that I now value and try with varying degrees of success or frustration to live towards.

Generosity that could be reckless but never calculating.

A capacity for work that lived up to one of her own greatest compliments -'not a lazy bone in her body'!

Laughter that revealed a sense of humour always sharp, but never cutting.

Courage to bear and forbear an illness that often undermined her deepest sense of self.

Compassion for others that was neither ashamed of tears nor afraid of the cost of helping.

A love for animals that was Schweitzer-like in its reverence for life.

An instinct for the circumstances of others that made her alert to those small, random acts of kindness we all like to have happen to us.

My mother also had her faults - I recognise some of them in me. But today I simply celebrate a life to which I owe my own, and incalculably more besides.

Requiescat in pace.

Aberdeen 4 FC Copenhagen 0

There's a time to be humble, to not gloat, to be self-deprecating, to shrug the shoulders apologetically and apologise for not doing what everybody expects; a time to remember that pride goes before a fall, to consider the feelings of others and refrain from crowing.

This isnae wan o' them, though!!!

Aberdeen 4 F C Copenhagen 0

At the end of a glorious evening of solidarity with the Dons, exhausted by the emotional and physical cost of kicking every ball (while lying supine on the sofa, occasionally hiding behind a cushion) we emerge not only as winners, but 4 -0. Christmas will be an anti-climax now, unless somebody can think opf something better than 4-0!

Anyway, not to go on about it, but I would like to place on record my appreciation for the efforts of the Aberdeen team this evening, my admiration for their earnest endeavours, my complete endorsement of their tactical awareness, and my absolute incredulity that when I play back the recording there are indeed four goals and I wasn't dreaming. So, to avoid being tediously repetitive, if I may reiterate briefly.....4-0!!!!!!!!!

Best corny line from the commentary: referring to the AFC management team, "There's the three wise men - Jimmy Calderwood, Jimmy Nicholl and Sandy Clark - and they're looking for a star tonight!"

Time to say my evening prayers, which tonight will be 4 thanksgivings and 0 complaints. 4-0, get it?