Living Wittily

Bird Migration, Immigration, and the Instinct for Home

The swallows are gone, have been for some weeks now. I miss them. On a late summer evening at Pitmedden gardens Richard and I watched an open air performance of Comedy of Errors. At the interval the queue was way too long to be served coffee so I went walkabout and saw this swallow just checking that the direction finding weather vane was properly calibrated.

Psalm 84.3 has one of those everyday images only noticed by those who look around with open eyes, even in church. Having gone to God's house gladly, the Psalmist has time to notice the birds securely ensconced in the place where all God's creatures should be safe.

"Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself." How much more then, the importance of making sure there is a place of safety and belonging for those other creatures who migrate from place to place in our world, looking for home. I refer to human beings.

Jesus Wasn't Wrong Then ....and He is Still Right.

"Consider the Hydrangeas", said Jesus, "They don't worry themselves to exhaustion ....but not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like them". I know,  Jesus lived in a pre industrial society and before capital consumerism, globalisation and digitalised finance grew like life threatening algae across the surface of human life.

Still. Around August every year for thirty years, outside the home of a friend, I've come face to face with this massive living bouquet of purple blue.

And I wonder. What would Jesus say now, to the anxious, driven unhappiness of our society insatiably wanting more, laying waste our planet, and oblivious of the precious unrepeatable gift that life is. Nothing radical. Just the same as he said then. "Seek first the Rule of God in your life....you can't serve God AND money." He was right then, and he is still right.  

God's Promises Are Realisable Hyperbole

The beach is a place of mystery to me. Those promises that the children of Abraham would number the sands of the sea sound like well meaning hyperbole - all the beaches of all the shores of the world - not to mention all the square miles of dunes from Sahara to Arizona.

But God knows what he's about, and anyway Genesis 22.17 only mentions the seashore. These five pebbles, lapped by the incoming tide have their own individual beauty, as does each grain of sand, and each child of God. Just as the lapidary rhythm of the waves and the sand smooth and soften the contours, so we tumble and roll in the grace of God, all the time taking shape as the people God calls us to be.

Sleep - And the Importance of Trust.

To avoid the blog becoming an essay and rant factory, this week a daily photo and brief expository comment.

As the Psalm writer says, in words redolent of trust in the good God, "I lie down and sleep....I am not afraid of tens of thousands of people".

So why lose sleep over the one or two people who might not find it easy to get on with me? That's their problem!

Well actually not just theirs - ours. Which means sometime soon I need to revisit Matthew 5.23-24 and take some initiatives.

Second Corinthians, where Paul is neither neurotic misogynist nor can do no wrong Apostle....

I guess most readers of this blog now know my enthusiasm for biblical exegetical commentaries. Eugene Peterson describes a commentary as a narrative about the text, and though he doesn't say so I'd go further and say that a well written and well read commentary tells the story of the text into our own story. In his days as a Bishop in the Church of South India Lesslie Newbigin urged pastor preachers to "always have some bible study going, working through the text with commentaries and lexicon and grammar." This he saw as an essential discipline which built towards a familiarity with the text while at the same time subverting a careless or complacent taking of the Bible for granted.

Right now I'm reading Raymond Collins, new commentary on Second Corinthians. In the next few months Mark Siefrid's volume in the Pillar series will be published, and so will George Guthrie's Baker Exegetical Commentary, both of them substantial scholarly contributions to our understanding of Paul's premier pastoral text. Allowing for the fact that Murray Harris, Frank Matera, Paul Barnett, Ralph Martin, Margaret Thrall and Victor Furnish have already published equally substantial treatments in the last 15 years or so, Paul's epistle is in danger of sinking under the weight of excessive exegesis.

True enough. So it's good to have an economically produced commentary of under 300 pages which gathers great learning into a treatment that is lucidly written, pastorally alert and theologically sensitive. Second Corinthians 5 is one of those passages that is definitive in much of my own theology with its emphasis on new creation, reconciliation and the cross of Christ. Passages like this need the tools to dig deeply and scan widely. But Collins is an experienced and informed guide through the argument, and a sharply sympathetic student of Paul. Collins understands Paul, his hang ups and insecurities, his gifts and weaknesses, he knows the cost of a pastoral heart hurt by rejection, and the inner trumoil of misunderstanding and relationships under strain. That's one of the strengths of the commentary - Collins cuts Paul enough slack to let Paul be Paul, which allows the voice of a passionate pastor to be heard more clearly, less  muffled by reader expectations of Paul as either neurotic misogynist or can do no wrong Apostle. 

Not many who come here will be commentary readers - those who are, this is a good one!

"...selfishness crucified and resurrected into the generosity of grace."

At the centre of the first photo two thicket branches intersect in a slightly crazed cross. Once you start looking for it, the cross becomes ubiquitous, at times intruding uninvited, other times we are the ones who look for it and see it.

Dr Sheila Cassidy during her time working in the Plymouth Hospice, saw the cross in window frames, door panels, ward furnishings, floor patterns.

The second photo is a close-up detail from the same thicket. The moss, lichen and flaking bark have their own poignant beauty of life holding on, just.

"When we look at Jesus Christ crucified and risen, the revelation of God it makes to us is this: God is redeeming love, in the power of omnipotence; or God is omnipotent power in the service of redeeming love."

These words are from unpublished papers of James Denney. Along with P T Forsyth and H R Mackintosh, he comprises a trinity of Scottish theologians of the cross, whose shared emphasis on atonement, reconciliation and forgiveness would provide the theological cantus firmus of much otherwise pragmatic contemporary missional thinking.

It's time too, that we Christians recovered a living faith in the cross as the core fuel of the Gospel, and the source of the Church's energy. The ubiquity of the sign of the cross, (it's thgere if we look for it) is a recurring call to followers of Jesus to embody lives of contradicted consumerism, of witness by embarrassing contrast and of selfishness crucified and resurrected into the generosity of grace.

Le Petit Prince - An Essential Read for Pastoral Theologians.

Education is about opening doors - doors of vision, opportunity, possibility, understanding. Not that I thought this while I was being a nuisance at Secondary School, and giving the French teacher a particularly hard time by deliberately mangling spoken French with an exaggerated Lanarkshire accent that must have sounded like a gearbox change without a depressed clutch.

When a few years later, having got Higher French at night school, I took French Studies at Glasgow University, I didn't expect that particular subject to provide some of the richest educational experiences of my student days, and on into my life. But that's what happened. For two years I studied the novels of Camus including his masterpiece, La Peste, read Le Figaro and followed the current affairs of France in 1971-2.

We reviewed 20th Century French Art such as Impressionism and post-Impressionism, cubism, dada and surrealism, and French Theatre including a study of Les Mains Sales by Sartre, the history of the French Republics, the political career of De Gaulle and the relations of France to Europe and its colonies. Immersion in the literature, history and language of another European nation was a profound intellectual experience of new perspective, sharpened perception and freshly cultivated sympathies. I am so glad I took that course; it made me a better human being by introducing me to the reality of worlds other than my own, and helped to shape me as a pastor in ways theology never could. 

Amongst the lasting voices from that course is Antoine De Saint Exupery. I read Vol de Nuit, (Night Flight) and immediately discovered a writer who wrote of loneliness, achievement, challenge, humanity. For Saint Exupery earth and sky are elemental realities, but also metaphors for those human experiences by which we grow and change, attempt and fail, take risks and fly or fall. His Wind, Sand and Stars contains some of the most beautiful reflections on human friendship that I know. Great writing has to have more than depth; it has to make you want to dive; writing that endures does so because it's living energy transfuses with the mind that reads it and shapes its future thought; transformative writing does not merely persuade or permit some new thoughts, it generates ideas, rearranges the familiar assumptions that furnish the mind, and fundamentally changes the way we think.

The first time I read Le Petit Prince I was taken aback by its strangeness. Yet repeatedly I found sentences and phrases and thoughts replete with that wisdom that is effortless, offhand, sentences of unremarkable words arranged with remarkable insight. Now some of its sentences have become familiar furniture in my own mind;

"What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. "

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

"A goal without a plan is just a wish."

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

I doubt I would have discovered Saint Exupery if I hadn'e been compelled by an MA course structure to take a modern language, and opted for French Studies, and without knowing what I was doing, opened doors - doors of vision, opportunity, possibility, understanding.

Music Therapy from Beethoven For Thos Who Have Been Tractor Tyred!

When I listen to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony it does what it is supposed to do. It opens up my mind to the countryside, the noises, smells and sights, and the feel and touch of organic, growing living things. And if they are the right living things the taste as well. I've got tickets for the Choral 9th Symphony in November and looking forward to my first hearing of it live with the RSNO. The soundtrack of The King's Speech brilliantly captured the solemnity and occasion of a King making a speech to the nation at a pivotal point in history by playing the slow sonorous march of the 7th Symphony, which I listen to often in the car. The Fifth is for me in a class of its own; I guess it addresses directly the serious existentialist in all of us when we are confronted with some of life's unforeseen and least explicable tragedies.

But the 6th, the Pastoral has always been deeply evocative of my childhood,  and some of its happiest memories of the countryside and farm life which was my growing up environment for fourteen years.

Playing around in the hayshed aged about 9, discovering where Milky the cat had got to the past couple of weeks - in her den with 5 new kittens. By the way bales of hay, those square rectangles of tightly packed hay tied with two lengths of baler twine, were a recent innovation. I remember pitch forks and hay stooks, and helping rake the hay in the hayfield.

Building a grass and stone dam across the wee burn at the bottom of our garden and making a pond deep enough to get soaked in.

Finding a Yellow-hammer's nest and seeing for the first time the Scottish ornithological equivalent of a Faberge, tints of lilac with dark purple traces, the background colour fading to white at the bottom of the egg, three of them nestling in a feathered cup, contained in grass and moss, built into the centre of a hawthorn bush beside the River Nith.

Being chased by a newly calved cow protective of its calf, and showing why it's important for folk walking in fields in the country not to assume that the bull is the more dangerous animal.

Helping Jack Duncan the farmer catch sheep in the field so he could cut away parts of the foot affected by foot rot and put anti fungal powder on. While I chased the sheep he practiced using his wedge in the long grass, hitting the golf ball in fields where it sometimes landed in dung!

Climbing fir trees getting the sap on my hands and loving the smell of pine. I still do and every time I smell it I remember that wood where we climbed and not an H&E inspector in sight.

And for those of you who haven't heard this story - my brother and the farmer's son persuading me to go inside a tractor tyre (I was about 8 and wee at the time) which they proceeded to roll down the hill with me inside, - and people wonder why I see the world from such varied perspectives! It nearly ended in tragedy as a car coming along the road was on a collision course with my tractor tyre trajectory so they bounced me, still in the tyre, over the ditch and into a field where the momentum slowed enough for me to crawl out, wondering why someone was holding my ankles and spinning me face down to the grass.

When I play Beethoven's Pastoral there is as described, awakening of cheerful feelings in the country, as my own memories populate this 200 year old piece of music with images and reminiscences that at the time were formative for who I am. I love and respect animals, wild and domestic, I need to have time and space in the country, recognise most bird sounds and flights, and grieve at the ruining of land and the depredation of natural habitat for so many of the creatures who share our environment.

The strange thing is, I never heard Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony until I was in my 20's, but it has the power to take me in imagination and memory to some of my favourite places in my inner landscape, and in the places where I've lived.

The photo of me at the Echt Agricultural Show this year is a tribute to that summer evening I was rolled like an Orkney Cheese down an Ayrshire farm road!

Music Therapy, When Grace Drizzles Wetly Down on Dry Stones

At just the right time, when we were powerless, Christ died for us..... (Romans 5.6) If you believe God is livingly active in the creation and sustaining of the world, then, it seems to me that now and again we are also likely to catch Him out at His providential being there before us. I've always felt the personal force of that first clause, "At just the right time....." Just now and again in my life, things have fallen into place in ways I didn't plan, couldn't see coming, and even as they happened didn't tumble to their  significance then, or the part they would play in this unfolding story that is my life.

The providence of God is both a comfort and a worry. So, I believe God is actively present in His Creation, and therefore in the details of an ordinary life of this one human being amongst billions, on this planet for a human lifetime, in one of any number you can think of galaxies and keep adding zeros? Really? This is one of those thoughts that theologians have never grasped, not for want of trying with big words and bigger and bigger concepts - omniscience, omnipresence, aseity, omnipotence, eternity. But am I really saying everything that happens is God's doing? No I'm not, but I can't get away from those times when the coincidence of time and circumstance in my own life at that time and place, has happened too often to ignore the thought that God was at it again.

I think providence is a tough doctrine to get my head round; but those occasional life coincidences, when "Just at the right time..." a grace unspeakable rescued me, are far too significant to be dissolved in the technical discourse of philosophical theology, cosmology, psychology or epistemology. Which brings me to music, and one evening when music washed across the aridity of a heart that was losing its rhythms, with affections disabled and suffering a diminishing grasp of purpose. Eliot described such pain with searing precision. 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.   (Waste Land, II, 19-24)

I've been in places like that. Some years ago, sitting in the home of a special friend, talking out of my own aridity and emptiness, in the background a piece of music was playing I had never heard before. "At just the right time", the kind unjudging words of a supportive friend who understood, were accompanied by background music which flowed like streams into the emptiness, slowly filling the long dry fissures turning them into new rivulets. The music didn't solve all the problems, how could it? But the insistent beauty, the patient harmonies, the composure and assurance, were like the gentle drizzle which slowly softens the surface, making it receptive to the coming deluge. And that's all hope needed. Drizzle!

The music was Spem in Alium - English Translation:

I have never put my hope in any other

but in You, O God of Israel

who can show both anger and graciousness,

and who absolves all the sins

of suffering man

Lord God,

Creator of Heaven and Earth

be mindful of our lowliness

Latin Original

 Spem in alium nunquam habui

Praeter in te, Deus Israel

Qui irasceris et propitius eris

et omnia peccata hominum

in tribulatione dimittis

Domine Deus

Creator caeli et terrae

respice humilitatem nostram

Here's Harry Christopher and The Sixteen performing in concert: You need ten minutes to listen to this.The last four minutes are applause!

The tapestry is called Shalom (I) and is a colour exegesis of Iasiah 35 verses 1 and 6. This was worked out of that remembered experience of grace drenched music.

Music Therapy for the Soul - Love for the Ridiculous and Surrendering to Profundity

The car radio is for me a sine qua non of travelling alone. Depending on my mood or the time of day it might be Radion 4 (serious and thoughtful), Radio Scotland ( local at times parochial though no worse for that), Classic FM (sometimes flipped to another channel when those ludicrously hyped up or condensed milk gelatinous adverts come on!), occasionally Northsound (even more parochial) and because a young friend set it on the pre-sets, Capital. Every now and then I hear a song, or some music I like and I go chasing a copy of it. Quite a number of CD's have been bought on the evidence of hearing one track on the radio - and some have been life enhancing and some were a waste of money to me and a source of money to the charity shops.

Sitting one day waiting for Sheila up a leafy suburban street in Aberdeen I sat watching a lesser spotted woodpecker doing its heid-baning thing on a tree trunk feet from the car. At the same time I was listening to Garrison Keillor, the Minnesota comedian talking about a new CD he had made with the American opera star Frederica Von Stade. The CD was a collection of songs about cats, all set to classic tunes from various genres, classical, country western, light opera. I loved it and bought it.  Here's the In and Out Song

I buy books. Anyone asked for a defining fact about JMG would be likely to mention books. After picking up a parcel from the post office I got into the car and sat for 5 minutes or more listening to the most haunting music I'd heard in a long time. It was Advent, and Classic FM were paying a then little known saxophonist, Christian Forshaw. The track was "Let all mortal flesh keep silence", and I have played that CD for 10 years and it still makes me stop, sit down, listen and get up amazed, and deeply satisfied that for those moments, I have worshipped, and heard again deep calling to deep. For me this ancient hymn, and this composition with saxophone, describe in sound the mystery and majesty of the Incarnation, and touch the deep chords of that miracle we call the Incarnation. Here's Forshaw's Let all Mortal Flesh Keep Silence. 

The music of Keillor that evokes laughter and a love for the ridiculous, and the music of Forshaw that gives sound to profundity, longing and awe, accidentally heard, and now intentionally loved, listened to as two voices in the choir of my own experience.