Living Wittily

The Colossians Christology Tapestry - Progress Report

I'm sitting listening to Karl Jenkins' Armed man: Mass for Peace, and right now the Gloria is loudly and splendidly defying the grey last day in January morning. I've also been working on the new tapestry which for the moment I'm calling the Christology tapestry. Don't laugh, at least not yet. I mentioned what this is all about in an earlier post over here.

The tapestry is slowly emerging from a daily living with the text of Colossians 1.15-20. The colours and emerging form are inevitably taking on some definition, and once ideas are worked into it they stay there. You can't paint over a tapestry, and you can't unstitch one worked on fine canvas with stranded cotton, so once the stitches are sewn, they stay. Of course there's risk and choice involved in a freehand work, though as it progresses the freedom and the choices are slowly constrained by previous work.  So certain colours are beginning to give shape, texture, character, and fixity to ideas which themselves emerge from reflective thought, mood and feeling, unconscious memory, personal preferences from previous choices, and so it goes on.

This is a fascinating experiment in close reading. I've read the passage often now, slowly as in lectio divina. I've studied it and taken notes from a number of commentaries, and currently working with J D G Dunn's commentary on the Greek text. At times I find myself chasing reference to other biblical references, or working out my own views on the importance of the prepositions, or the parallels with OT wisdom, and so on.

Other times there is the sheer beauty of the imagery, and the theological refreshment of browsing in a text that is profoundly formative of Christian vision, giving urgency to spiritual imagination and lifting devotion into adoration. Then again I've consulted several scholarly articles delving into background, semantic puzzles, literary structure, Pauline theology, history of interpretation, and then gone back and read it again in the new light -  - and all of this bringing the text to life, opening up a theological vista which opens up the mind, and then comes to the point of a needle with thread!

Anyway. Reading Dunn's comments about the Colossian hymn this morning Ifound this:

  "...it is important to realisethat this is not the lanaguage of clinical analysis but of poetic imagination, precisely the medium where a quantum leap across disparate categories can be achieved by use of unexpected metaphor, where the juxtaposition of two categories from otherwise unrelated fields can bring an unlooked for flash of insight."  The Epistles to Colossians and Philemon. NIGTC (Grand rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 93.

That's as good a description of the proper use of metaphor as I know.

"So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...."

So, friends, every day do something

that won't compute. Love the Lord. 

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

I came across these lines a while ago, noted them, and intended to go looking for where they came from - and forgot. They turned up again and this time I Googled them. I was surprised to find that, unsurprisingly, they are written by Wendell Berry. Surprising because to be honest I should have recognised them, and that for several reasons. Unsurprising because, first, I've now read swathes of Berry's poems, and his Sabbath Poems is at my bedside.

Second, I can almost hear his slow diction as he looks out at the world of people and says, slowly, "So, friends..." I know few poets who use the word 'friend' with such convincing sincerity - Seamus Heaney being another.

Third, the benevolent Luddite exhortation against the human obession with computing, calculating, bottom line, data-gathering ways of evading the beauty of the world.

Fourth the underlying grace and humanity of the last three lines, which define love not by definition but by disposition, action and the unselfing of the self.

The words come in one of Berry's signature poems, a long series of exhortations and life guidance, a sharing of experience that is the essence of wisdom, but to many others would sound like folly, and perhaps, above all, a poem that calls in question much of the trivia we invest with exaggerated significance in a world consumed by the human desire to consume. Our culture loves the sound byte and the buzz phrase - one of the kore recent 'taking the long view'. In ways much deeper than shrewd business strategies, Berry's poem takes the long view, and encourages the dispositions and actions of love, for others, for the world, for the Lord.

(The photo was taken from a ruined castle in rural Aberdeenshire)

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer's Liberation Front.

Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Slow reading of Slim Volumes 1. Colin Gunton, Christ and Creation

One of the benefits of a slim book, apart from economy of shelf space in a crowded study, is the ease with which it can be re-read, especially if first time round it was annotated. You'd think previous pencil footmarks and annotated fingerprints would be a distraction - it is if someone else did them. For me they always make me wonder why I thought that important enough to underline, annotate, not want to forget; and also to ask do I still think that? Colin Gunton's Christ and Creation, 126 pages of lucid reflection on two alpine doctrinal themes, is well worth re-reading, as I've just discovered. 

Freedom is not an absolute, but something exercised in relation to other persons, and that means in the first instance that it is the gift of the Spirit of God over against us, God in personal otherness enabling us to be free. It is in our relatedness that we are free or not, and this is true of all human life. (p55)

The self-emptying of the eternal Son in the incarnation and passion is an expression of the love of the triune God worked out in the structures of fallen time and space. (p88)

The church is thus the community where fallen forms of relationship are invalidated and outgrown; are unlearned through the grace of God and the work of the Spirit. It is important to remember that what is involved is not instant transformation, but a reordering of teleology or directedness. (p110)

Freedom, kenosis and community - now there are three areas crying out for serious consideration as validating criteria for Christian community which exists for the purposes of witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

 

Holocaust Remembrance Day: Elie Wiesel and the Saving Power of Memory

On a sunny July afternoon, sitting under a plum tree, in a cottage garden near Goatland, Yorkshire, I was reading the first volume of an autobiography. A few yards away at the bottom of the garden, the stream chuckled and murmured, the small bird population was out and about, and it was a good day to be on holiday. Across the stream, the old railway line on which the steam train still ran twice a day, and a hundred yards away the railway bridge, its arches blackened by smoke, through which the train appeared still puffing out the smoke that immediately sent me back to a childhood in Ayrshire beside the main New Cumnock - Dumfries line.

That afternoon, in good time, the train could be heard chugging its way along the valley, and as it approached the bridge the whistle sounded. It was a moment of epiphany for me, a coincidence of sound, smell and sight which transformed what I was reading into words that became eerie and frightening, and resonant with a solemn awareness of life's ambiguity and tragedy I have hardly ever felt, before or since.

I was reading Elie Wiesel's newly published autobiography, All Rivers Rune to the Sea. I was reading, at the precise time the Yorkshire steam train approached the bridge, the paragraphs in which he recalls as a teenager, the sound of the train engines chugging, the whistles screaming, the clanking of the wagons, as trains left for Auschwitz. In Yorkshire, on holiday in sunshine,the picturesque reminded of the grotesque 60 years earlier in Poland. And did so with such force the memory remains vivid. That coincidence of my life with what I was reading of another's life, is fixed as one of those moments in life when truth penetrates well below the radar of rational control, and we are bereft of explanation. There is a mystery of human connectedness that just is, and we are not wrong in sensing the need for humility, and the risk that we stand on the brink of what is holy. 

In perhaps the most famous words Wiesel has written, seared in the minds of those who read them first in Night, Wiesel stated with adamantine intent, his life's work:

"Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

Holocaust Remembrance Day is as important as any other day in the Christian Calendar. It is a day to remember human capacity for evil, and for good. But actually, Wiesel does not see these two as the ultimate polarity. His experiences at Auschwitz showed him something much more sinister and corrosive of humanity, something that can ignore cruelty, smother compassion, approve atrocity, silence conscience, even re-set conscience to a default setting of complacency - he called it indifference.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”

To play Mozart as the welcoming music at Auschwitz is a grotesque example of such indifference. At the heart of Christian civilisation mechanised murder was made possible, and human worth and value neutralised by ideology, and indifference to human consequences. This should never be forgotten. Wiesel is right, and has the right, in my view the absolute right, to require of the Christian church, a willingness to remember, to repent, and never to forget the consequences of a Christian theology laced with the toxins of anti-semitic rhetoric, co-opted by a state church in thrall to the political power brokers. Such thralldom is as far removed from the New Testament truth of the crucified Jewish Jesus, and the New Testament visions of the Church as the Body of Christ, as can be conceived by minds indifferent (Wiesel's word) to the message of reconciliation in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, and the realiry of the Messiah in whom the two become one.

The last words are from Elie Wiesel.

For us, forgetting was never an option. Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.

“This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.”

 

I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/eliewiesel117181.html#SxrM02gQIdsIUycw.99

I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/eliewiesel117181.html#SxrM02gQIdsIUycw.99

What do you do with 9,500 wheelie bins?

I love this news item from the BBC website:

Councillors in Orkney are demanding an investigation after being left with thousands of extra wheelie bins worth more than £180,000 for a new waste disposal scheme.

The bins have been issued to more than 9,000 households over the past two years.

Orkney Islands Council has been left with 9,500 spares, worth £188,000.

The authority is looking at possible uses for the bins but admitted it was not an ideal situation.

A spokesman said that "in hindsight some of the planning assumptions that had underpinned the project had resulted in some unforeseen outcomes".

...........

Why didn't the spokesman say "Sorry, we made a mistake".

Imagine a child who spilt the Ribena on the carpet saying, " in hindsight some of the planning assumptions that had underpinned the project resulted in some unforeseen outcomes",

Or

a speeding motorist saying to the police, "in hindsight some of the planning assumptions that had underpinned the project resulted in some unforeseen outcomes."

However the Orkney Council is considering alternative uses for the 9,500 wheelie bins. Suggestions please?

"I do not see the national flag flying from the staff of the sycamore" - A poem for Peace.

During the Cold War, when the rhetoric of hate was used to manufacture enmity, and the world stood as never before on the brink of mutual destruction, and the imagination was seduced, exploited and ultimately corrupted into seeing the Other as ultimate threat, malign in fanatic intent to destroy those who were not them - during that chilling time, there were other voices. One of them was Wendell Berry. The following poem is the rhetoric of respect, empathy, understanding and flagrant humanity. Yes flagrant, there to be seen, unmistakable evidence, an example of the imagination redeemed from alienating the other to seeking shared concern, murtual help, unambiguous welcome.

This is an all but unanswerable argument for understanding between cultures, nations, communities and families, and for a conversion of mind from national self interest to the recognition that we live, not in a pluralist world where difference is prioritised, but in a human world where common humanity is what constitutes togetherness, and guarantees that other differences are transcended by the inherent worth, miracle and mystery of human being. I of course would want to push this thought further into the importance of imago dei as one of the fundamental axioms of how Christians view other human beings, and I have a feeling Wendell berry would not be uncomfortable with giving such high currency to the value and beauty of every human life. 

This is a long poem - and needs to be.

TO A SIBERIAN WOODSMAN
(after looking at some pictures in a magazine)

Wendell Berry

1.
You lean at ease in your warm house at night after supper,
listening to your daughter play the accordion. You smile
with the pleasure of a man confident in his hands, resting
after a day of long labor in the forest, the cry of the saw
in your head, and the vision of coming home to rest.
Your daughter’s face is clear in the joy of hearing
her own music. Her fingers live on the keys
like people familiar with the land they were born in.

You sit at the dinner table late into the night with your son,
tying the bright flies that will lead you along the forest streams.
Over you, as your hands work, is the dream of still pools.
Over you is the dream
of your silence while the east brightens, birds waking close by
you in the trees.

2.
I have thought of you stepping out of your doorway at dawn,
your son in your tracks.
You go in under the overarching green branches of the forest
whose ways, strange to me, are well known to you as the sound
of your own voice
or the silence that lies around you now that you have ceased to speak,
and soon the voice of the stream rises ahead of you,
and you take the path beside it.
I have thought of the sun breaking pale through the mists over you
as you come to the pool where you will fish, and of the mist drifting
over the water, and of the cast fly resting light on the face of the pool.

3.
And I am here in Kentucky in the place I have made myself
in the world. I sit on my porch above the river that flows muddy
and slow along the feet of the trees. I hear the voices of the wren
and the yellow-throated warbler whose songs pass near the windows
and over the roof. In my house my daughter learns the womanhood
of her mother. My son is at play, pretending to be
the man he believes I am. I am the outbreathing of this ground.
My words are its words as the wren’s song is its song.

4.
Who has invented our enmity? Who has prescribed us
hatred of each other? Who has armed us against each other
with the death of the world? Who has appointed me such anger
that I should desire the burning of your house or the
destruction of your children?
Who has appointed such anger to you? Who has set loose the thought
that we should oppose each other with the ruin of forests and
rivers, and the silence of the birds?
Who has said to us that the voices of my land shall be strange
to you, and the voices of your land strange to me?

Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to destroy you,
or that I could improve myself by destroying you? Who has imagined
that your death could be negligible to me now that I have seen
these pictures of your face?
Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you,
or laugh with you, or visit in your house and go to work with
you in the forest?
And now one of the ideas of my place will be that you would
gladly talk and visit and work with me.

5.
I sit in the shade of the trees of the land I was born in.
As they are native I am native, and I hold to this place as
carefully as they hold to it.
I do not see the national flag flying from the staff of the sycamore,
or any decree of the government written on the leaves of the walnut,
nor has the elm bowed before any monuments or sworn the oath of allegiance.
They have not declared to whom they stand in welcome.

6.
In the thought of you I imagine myself free of the weapons and
the official hates that I have borne on my back like a hump,
and in the thought of myself I imagine you free of weapons and
official hates,
so that if we should meet we would not go by each other
looking at the ground like slaves sullen under their burdens,
but would stand clear in the gaze of each other.

7.
There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with
you in silence besides the forest pool.
There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose
hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.
There is no national glory so comely as my daughter who
dances and sings and is the brightness of my house.
There is no government so worthy as my son who laughs, as he
comes up the path from the river in the evening, for joy.

Out of the Marvellous: Documentary on Seamus Heaney

I just watched the documentary on Seamus Heaney, shown on BBC 4 last night and available on IPlayer now on the link below.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03b9q6j/Seamus_Heaney_Out_of_the_Marvellous/

Heaney has a secure place in my poetry canon, both as poet and as human being. Few poets whose lives have overlapped with my lifetime, have captured so much of what I recognise and discover to be true, important and durable in my own experience. R S Thomas and Denise Levertov more often than not; Mary Oliver now and then; Elizabeth Jennings when on her good and very good days.

But Heaney's poetry, and the persuasive humanity and generosity of mind he exhibited, make his poetry accessible and familiar. He makes the local universal, his poetry combines lyrical beauty and ethical depth - the observations included in the speech of conferral for the Nobel Prize.

Just go watch this programme and encounter the poet who gives poets and poetry not only a good name, but does so with a self-effacing modesty and knowing humanity that is his poetry's own justication.

Interpretation of scripture has to be biographical. Jurgen Moltmann again.

Jurgen Moltmann has a wee gem of an essay in his book Experiences in Theology. 'Trinitarian Hermeneutics of 'holy scripture'' is a thoughtful statement on what makes writings 'holy scripture' for the Church, and how these scriptures are most fully and faithfully understood within the story of the Triune God.  "The New Testament talks about God by proclaiming in narrative the relationships of the Father the Son and the Spirit, which are relationships of fellowship,  and are open to the world."

In that one sentence Moltman brings into dynamic relationship with the Triune God, the triune realities of Scripture, Church and Mission. Much 'missional' theology and practice tends to look to Scripture primarily as its mandate and defining source. As I read Moltmann here and elsewhere, I wonder if he is saying something much more about mission, and about Scripture. The interpretation of Scripture is at its most 'missional' when the hermeneutic lens used is the living witness of a community that embodies Scripture in a way that recalls, re-presents and effectively demonstrates the subject of Scripture - Jesus Christ.

Now I concede that I may be over-reading Moltmann here, but if so it is a trajectory that would still be consistent with his theology. He goes on to reflect on the christological finality, the once for all-ness, of God's revelation and the witness of Scripture.

Then he says this: "What God brings into the world through Christ is life. God the Spirit is the source, wellspring of life - life that is healed, freed, full, indestructible and eternal. Christ himself is the resurrection and the life in person. Those who believe in him will live even though they die, because to them life has been made manifest. They experience it with their senses. So the sending of the Spirit is at the same time the sending of life. From this we can conclude that a 'spiritual interpretation of scripture' has to be a biographical interpretation. Through the ways in which we express our lives we interpret the scriptural texts we live with....The book of the Bible is interpreted by our lived lives, for it is the 'book of life'....The sending of the Spirit (missio Dei) awakens life and multifarious movements of revival and healing. So life is the true interpreter. (146)

Moltmann then explores briefly what life is, what enhances and what diminishes life, what furthers life and what hinders it. He wants the church to work out what in the texts furthers life, and through the texts subject to critique whatever is hostile to life and offers 8 guidelines - here is number 7

What furthers life is, first and last, whatever makes Christ present, Christ who is the resurrection and the life in person; for in and with Christ the kingdom of eternal life is present, and the kingdom overcomes.

Much of what Moltmann is arguing here is rooted in I John 1.1-4, Hebrews 1, John 1. The Trinitarian hermeneutic takes hold of Scripture in the light of the narrative  of the relationships between Father, Son and Spirit, as these are revealed in the Gospel story of Jesus. The overarching theme of this story is life, 'the word of life', the one who said 'I am the life' and who promised 'I have come that you might have life to the full', and whose ministry is enabled by the Spirit of life who takes of the things of Jesus and makes them known; the one in whom was life, and the life was the light of all people, this One, is the one who gives eternal life, and calls each person to a living out of the Truth of the one who said 'I am the Life'. In which case Moltmann perhaps helps us to understand more deeply a 'missional' view of Scripture - which is to read scripture in the light of the life of God in Christ, and live as an embodied, related, community of fellowship that is the church, the Body of Christ.

Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Review, Part One.

It is very difficult to challenge the authority and accuracy of a whole tradition of accepted scholarship. That's partly because the whole weight of scholarly opinion has based itself on "accepted" assumptions, so that cumulatively these assumptions take on the status of certainties. To challenge them seems like a singular lack of humility, questioning the scholarship and intellectual cogency by saying up till now the tradition has been wrong.

Ive just finished reading Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His call to Peacemaking, a jointly written book by Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G Siegrist and Danile P Umbee. It is an irenic but firm questioning of all previous scholarship based on the assumption that Bonhoeffer was actively complicit in conspiracy and assassination plots. More particularly it examines the widespread implication of such actions on Bonhoeffer's theological ethics and challenges with detailed argument the assumption that Bonhoeffer was ever involved in any explicit assassination plot. Careful study of Bonhoeffer's life, his own spoken and written testimony. the evidence of his writings from Barcelona to his final letters, and examination of the actual evidence for Bonhoeffer's alleged involvement in assassination plots, are all used to build the case that Bonhoeffer was not involved in the various plots for assassination and coup d'etat.  In doing so the authors enage with some of the finest Bonhoeffer scholarship including Bethge, the recent biography by Schlingensiepen, Sabine Dramm (another scholar focusing on Bonhoeffer and the Resistance) and numerous other leading scholars including some of the editors of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English. The book is a tour de force, but is founded on careful exegesis of text, life and the testimony of Bonhoeffer and his circle of family and friends.

The book argues towards a pivotal challenge to the established taxonomy of Bonhoeffer's life and writings, and his changing views on war, peace and violence. The 1929 Barcelona lecture "Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic" enjoins taking up arms in war to protect one's Volk. This is an uncompromising moral principle, Bonhoeffer argues. Sometime in 1930-31, coinciding with his time in New York at Union Seminary and Harlem, he spoke of a complete transformation, which amounted to a conversion, a turnaround in which the Bible become central in his life as the revelatory Word of God. The Sermon on the Mount was no longer neutralised as radical demand by the Lutheran appeal to the two kingdoms. Several years later when his most famous book, Discipleship, was published Bonhoeffer's definitive position was clear. At the centre of his life, and of every Christian's life is the Word spoken by God in Jesus Christ, a word of peace, reconciliation, struggle and risk. The Barcelona lecture and the book known as The Cost of Discipleship, stand at polar opposites in Bonhoeffer's understanding of Christian obedience to the call of God.

It is the absolute clarity and conviction of his position in Discipleship that creates the difficulty in explaining how the person who wrote this book could possibly then move to a position in which complicity in assassination was even thinkable. Bonhoeffer's commitment to pacifism as expounded in Discipleship is not in itself the absolute, grounding principle. The authors of this book argue powerfully, and persuasively, that pacifism is an inevitable implicate of Bonhoeffer's placing Jesus Christ as revealed in the Gospel and the Gospels, at the centre of Christian existence. Non-violent peacemaking is an essential stance and disposition of those who are followers of the incarnate, crucified and risen Lord of the Church. Therefore pacifism, far from being an isolated moral axiom, is the outer expression of an inner orientation of complete obedience to the revelatory Word of God in Christ, a gift of grace that calls the Christian to take up the cross and follow Christ to Calvary and beyond.

Once this essential point is established, it then becomes necessary to explain how such a life commitment transmutes under constant and all but intolerable moral and spiritual pressures in the toxic ethos of the Third Reich, into an ethic of expediency which justifies involvement in lethal force against Hitler. Mainsteam Bonhoeffer scholarship appeals to the later more mature, nuanced and realistic writings of Bonhoeffer's unfinished volume Ethics, to explain this shift. The authors of Bonhoeffer the Assassin? set out to challenge this position, and suggest there is a continuous line of development in Bonhoeffer's theological ethics that offers an altogether different trajectory. They seek to demonstrate Bonhoeffer's consistency in action and writing,from 1930 onwards, with the cruciform convictions so powerfully argued in Discipleship and in Finkenwalde. Non-violent pacifism was the implicate of an obedient discipleship on which Bonhoeffer did not waver. That is their agument.

In my second post I'll come back to this fascinating book showing how they conclude their case, and exploring what this book might mean for the way we read Bonhoeffer and appropriate his thought for our own context. . The.

The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea. Psalm 94.3

I went along Aberdeen prom yesterday then out to the Torry Battery. It was a mind clearing exercise with a chilled North East breeze, an agitated sea, and a capuccino to go from the Inversnecky cafe! Took these three photos - I love the sea in this boisterous mood, putting on a show of power - and reminding us we should never complain about the price of haddock!

 

"Praise the LORD from the earth, you great sea creatures and all ocean depths" 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters; they saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep. For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea. Psalm 107