Living Wittily

The Importance of Intellectual History, and Learning Why People Think What They Think.

Intellectual history enables us to understand how others have understood the world, human affairs, God, culture and much else. Applied to theology, intellectual history is the exploration 0f the people, the social context, the cultural tensions and developments and the intellectual climate out of which theological changes and developments emerge. Within the Christian tradition such changes are either welcomed or resisted, and are seen as conserving or liberalising aspects and elements of the Christian tradition.

Throughout my life I have read widely, ecumenically and I hope both critically and appreciatively, across a range of standpoints within the overall Christian tradition. It may be more appropriate to acknowledge that the Christian tradition is in reality a diversity  of traditions flowing as tributaries from the same headwater. My own tributary is evangelical but with open mind and heart, as befits a Baptist who takes seriously our historic commitment to religious freedom and the refusal to require subscription to credal confessions. So I am an ecumenical evangelical, and a curious one at that.

I am just starting off on my summer big read. In three volumes Gary Dorrien provides an intellectual history of liberal theology as it has developed in America over 300 years. This is a history of Christian thought as it has encountered the modern world, and the adjustments and accomodations many theologians felt compelled to make in order to maintain their intellectual integrity whilst remaining faithful to the deposit of the faith.

The very words conservative and liberal are pejorative words before they ever become descriptive. What sets Dorrien's account apart is the generosity he shows in assuming the intellectual integrity and sincerity with which such thinkers went about their thinking and theology. Far from undermining the faith, they believed passionately they were making it comprehensible and credible in a changing world increasingly secular, shaped by science and technology, and in which the challenges to Christian beliefs, values and practices would come with increasing confidence, and would call in question religious authority, relevance and social privilege.

That the three volumes are devoted to North America is both a plus and a minus. On the plus side it enables Dorrien to examine the growth of liberal theology in careful historical and biographical detail. The biographical research lying behind these volumes is deep, informative and essential; intellectual biography is crucial in writing intellectual history. Ideas may be conceived in the abstract, but they are best expounded out of the life of those who think them and give the best articulation of them. My own research over the years has been heavily indebted to intellectual biography. To place ideas in the lived social and cultural context out of which they originated is an essential discipline which ensures the ideas don't take on the life and content of the interpreter rather than the original thinker.  So, biographical context, cultural and social milieu, and the historical matrix within which ideas are first thought, expounded, and argued for and against; these are major gains in Dorrien's superb achievement in these volumes. 

On the minus side, liberal theology is not geographically constrained; nor is it of one cultural flavour, nor the privileged claim of one national context. In the same two centuries there were massive shifts in intellectual and theological climate across Europe and especially in Germany and Britain. The erosion of biblical authority which caused such a furore in the United States in the mid to late 19th Century caused similar disruption in Germany, England and Scotland during the same decades. The causes and outcomes were different but the underlying conflict over the authority of the Bible and the contested notions of inerrancy and infallibility were similar. Or by the early to mid Twentieth Century American theology was increasingly influenced by the thought of major European thinkers from Schleiermacher to Ritschl, and Barth to Bultmann. Thus American liberal theology was by no means home grown. But Dorrien is aware of this, and what he has produced is a comprehensive, authoritative intellectual history of the American liberal theological mindset. In  doing so he has also exposed the historic and intellectual processes out of which liberal theology grew and bore fruit that continues to sustain, challenge and renew theological study towards an adequate and relevant faithfulness in seeking to communicate the content of the Christian faith in a world less impressed, less patient, and in many ways, less interested.

A few years ago I read volume one. I'll read it again, kind of the way you watch episode one just to refresh the story before episodes two and three. And occasionally a report back here about the journey so far.       

Carrie Newcomer and How I Came to Like the Music I like?

I've never fully understood why I like some music. Nor why some forms of music don't do it for me. I tend to be eclectic, open and adaptable to what comes at me as new, different, in another discourse, idiom or sound. Some of my first experiences of music are quite vivid memories which may help explain those eclectic tastes, laced with likes and dislikes. I remember 1960, aged 9, listening to the radio and Elvis crooning "Wooden heart", not long after came Cliff and his nostalgic "The Young Ones". I can still sing them near word perfect.

Up till then my diet included the old 78 records played on our gramophone; Kenneth McKellar, Nat King Cole, Vera Lynn, Harry Belafonte, Shotts and Dykehead Pipe Band, Cavaleria Rusticana, Connie Francis and Mahalia Jackson.

Some years later throughout the 1960's an avalanche of new sounds, and for that decade a sense of music being all pervasive and increasingly available on transistor radio, 45 singles and 33 LP Albums. Beatles, Hollies, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, The Who, The Kinks - these are predictable. Less so was my enthusiasm for female performers, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, Marianne Faithful, Joan Baez, though at that age I never quite got Bob Dylan - which outraged one of my pals who had far more cultural discernment than I had, and believed, rightly as it turned out, that Dylan would endure and would rearrange the entire furniture shop of popular music.

By my late teens I had discovered Country music. Johnny Cash was and remains a giant in my own musical enjoyment and enrichment. But over the years since I confess to listening to Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Kenny Rogers, George Jones, Buck Owens, Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette,and a pick and mix medley of many others who came and went, some now forgotten. Early 70's I came across John Denver live on a BBC programme and recognised a voice that spoke my emotional language. I still have a dozen of his vinyl albums, and regularly play his best songs - he went through a New Age stage when I think much of his music became like over-diluted fruit juice! But his best music remains one of the richer strands in my musical history

Classical music floored me when I first heard the choral finale of Beethoven's 9th symphony on the television. It was played as part of a programme celebrating the achievements of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders' leader, Jimmy Reid. He chose it as a musical version of his socialist vision, of brotherhood, shared joy and shared resources, and an end to poverty and hunger amongst the poor whether on Glasgow's doorstep or anywhere else. The combination of Reid's passion, his political energy, the story of his early years of hunger, hard work and the early death of his father, all combined to make the Ode to Joy an aural celebration of what it means to be human, and in solidarity with humanity.It came with the force of a revelation of what music can be, and do.

Then came my first hearing of Yehudi Menuhin's definitive performance of Brahm's Violin Concerto which I still can't listen to without sitting down and allowing that music to re-order my dishevelled spirits. It was one of my first birthday presents from Sheila. Beethoven's symphonies and piano concertos and Mozart's concertos, the violin concertos of Brahms, Bruch, Barber and Tchaikovsky, and then some Dvorak, Sibelius, Handel and Baroque followed, and more lately still Renaissance choral music, discovered one evening listening to Spem in Alium in a friend's house. By now my musical back catalogue, like a juke box in my head (much more tangible than a playlist) included 60's pop, 70's Country, and a varied ad hoc but growing list of favourite classical composers.

Sometime in the 1990's I came across a little known female folk and country singer, Carrie Newcomer. There was a review article in Sojourner's Magazine and it raved about the social conscience and ethical edge of her songs. I listened a lot to her over the years, and her songwriting has become stronger, more mature, and still has that edge of ethical care for the world and its people.

I mention that long backlist of music I have loved for a reason! And the reason is the question I started with - I still don't don't know why I like some music and not others.

But here's the thing. Some music doesn't wait for our opinion, analysis, approval or attention. I think it's the distinctive voice and the fit of words to where we are when we hear it. Some music opens us up to new understandings of the world, ourselves, and the complex perplexities of trying to make this life of ours work. Carrie Newcomer does this for me, which is why I go back and replay her music, even when there are intervals of months in between. A new Carrie Newcomer album isn't only an obvious purchase, it's like deciding to take in another night class on compassionate self awareness and humane other awareness.

Newcomer is an important voice crying in the wilderness of a distracted and often heartless world. I am growing older and I'm looking for songs that nurture memories and hopes, that touch into those deep regrets, remembered joys, sounds of past laughter and silences of past pain. In a world of noise and speed, obsession with newness, and hooked on the false security of having and possession, the music I want to carry within me has to have the capacity to sustain who it is I have now become, but also to pull me forward to what is ahead. And just as in my most important reading I look for life wisdom, stories of hopeful newness, and celebration of human resilience and compassion in the face of all that diminishes hope and constrains goodness, so also in music. Carrie Newcomer is a consistent source of such qualities of insight and attentiveness to the human, the spiritual and the hopeful. She is also someone who embodies in her own life commitments the best of the songs she writes and sings.

In the next post I'll write about how Geography of Light, one of her best albums, achieves some of this.

Gratefulness as a Daily Discipline of Taking Time to Notice What's Going On.

Yesterday we had a Prayer Cafe at our Church. Scones and coffee, then we spent some time working out how we can grow a disposition of gratefulness. As preparation for this I had prepared some working observations of what is implied in being a grateful person. Over a couple of days I noted down what seemed to point in the right general direction of what being a grateful person kight look, or feel like.

To be grateful is to be humble, recognising how much we receive from God and others.

To be grateful is to pay attention to all the good that is happening in our lives, and see God’s signature.

To be grateful is to be so thankful for our blessings that we try to be God’s blessing in someone else’s life.

To be grateful is to speak of Christ to others, and use our gifts generously in their service.

To be grateful is to remember the love and grace that has touched, changed and enabled us in Christ.

To be grateful is to look for the breeze of the Spirit rippling across the grain fields of our lives.

To be grateful is to begin each day glad to be alive, and determined to make each day count for God.

To be grateful, then, is to live in the joy of God, and to give thanks in all circumstances.

Love Lies Bleeding, and Bleeding Hearts: A Meditation on a Poem by R S Thomas

 

 Bleeding hearts. it's the name of a flower. And it's obvious why. Those heart shaped flowers, pink veined but with the deepening red gathering as tear shaped pendant drops. A heart broken, the promise of love now wounded, the flowers become bleeding hearts.

The colours are startling in Spring and early summer, perhaps because that is the season of life, and the recovery of growth and vitality. I noticed them while walking in Crathes Castle gardens on a warm sunlit afternoon.

Earlier I had been writing something and had quoted the words of Paul in Romans 5, "God commends his love towards us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." That profound and unsettling truth links divine love with human sin, and does so by proclaiming a causal connection between the death of Jesus, divine judgement, human sin and divine love. What's that all about? The question, no less bewildering for its contemporary informality, is much to the point.

God is love is one of the key affirmations of the Christian Gospel, embedded throughout the New Testament and explained and wondered at in the writings of Paul, John and Peter.

When Peter talks of humans being redeemed by the precious blood of Christ he is saying that on Calvary, love lies bleeding.

When Paul affirms he lives "by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me" he is growing towards an atonement theology in which love lies bleeding, and the wounds are borne into the heart of God.

When John has Jesus say, "I if I be lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to me...for God so loved the world", he is articulating the heart of God, and anticipating Golgotha where love will lie bleeding, and die.

The juxtaposition of red heart-shaped flowers with pendant tear drops, and the imagery of the crucified Christ, and that name, "Bleeding Hearts" didn't prepare me for one of those moments when there is a near audible click as several things fit together. Later that day I was reading some poems by R S Thomas. When I am in an interrogative mood, I go looking for fellowship with RST. And I came upon this poem while still thinking of those flowers.

Before writing more, here it is:

                Which

And in the book I read:

God is love. But lifting

my head, I do not find it

so. Shall I return

 

to my book and, between

print, wander an air

heavy with the scent

of this one word? Or not trust

 

language, only the blows that

life gives me, wearing them

like those red tokens with which

an agreement is sealed.

 

He too is asking the question, God is love; "What's that all about?" The poem is a confession, but not of faith. He confesses that he is unpersuaded. God is love? "I do not find it so". Thomas scorned sentiment as a substitute for hard thinking. That first question which takes up the second stanza is a rhetorical disclaimer. Of course not. Love isn't a heavily scented word, if it is then it isn't love, and definitely not the kind of love that, for love of the other, lies bleeding. Forget the word, says Thomas. Not language, but life experience might better exegete the meaning of love. "The blows life gives me", and the consequent grief, sadness, loss, and suffering we each endure, these are real, and have to be lived with and lived through. It isn't that Thomas doesn't believe in any kind of love. This second question which takes seriously life's suffering, is the other option. Do not trust language when it is not adequate to the realities it seeks to describe, is Thomas's point. Another astringent thinker, P T Forsyth, complained "it is hard for words to stretch to the measure of eternal things". That I think is what Thomas is saying. Trust "only the blows that life gives me", and wear them like the red molten wax, "red tokens with which an agreement is sealed". But what does that mean?

Faith in God is not about feeling, not even about clear disciplined reasoning, whether about love or hope or peace or whatever. Faith, in this poem, is the capacity to trust the life we are living and to trust that our life, in all its pain and joy, is underwritten by a sealed agreement between - well between which parties? Thomas avoids the word covenant, but the hint is broad enough. And those red tokens of melted wax, red and liquid, and then solidifying into permanence, become a metaphor for that love which though inexplicable, and forever evasive of language however fragrant or precise, is nevertheless real and to be trusted. 

And perhaps for Thomas the priest, the sealed agreement of the divine love that lies bleeding, is recalled and reaffirmed at each Eucharist, when faith again takes hold of the symbols hinted at in those red tokens. And in the reaching out to take the bread and wine redolent of the suffering Christ, faith knows, or at least surmises, that 'those blows that life gives me" are caught up into something eternal, and that, defying all attempts at linguistic control, we call Love. 

When God is unaccountably silent, unreasonably absent, apparently indifferent,

Now here's something you don't come across every day. An honest account of what it feels like when God is unaccountably silent, unreasonably absent, apparently indifferent, and our inner climate is colder than winter. That's the title of one of my favourite songs, sung by Sarah Brightman in a stunning Winter concert. The refrain is a quietly sad relinquishment, "It's colder than winter, since you closed the door."

Renita Weems writes of that experience of God not being there, not being here, not being near. There are the usual phrases, spiritual dryness, dark night of the soul, wilderness experience, and the Christian tradition acknowledges those periods when something shuts down in us. The question is what we do with what we feel. And that's a hard question because often, feeling that inner emptiness, and knowing that loss of motivation and sense of purpose, it's hard to even think about what to do, let alone do it. Life has its seasons, including winter. Weems has learned that Winter may best be lived through by waiting, and trusting that in the silence and waiting, newness and life is recovering and pushing again towards Spring."Eventually we have to accept that dying and rising, freezing and thawing, resting and rebounding, sleeping and awakening are the necessary conditions for all growth and creativity." (37)

Thinking about those previous times when 'something in me had shut down', she came to the conclusion "The soul flourishes and withers scores of times in the face of the sublime." That insight positively glows with realism. It is a recognition that life is rhythmic, that relationships can never be sustained at the apex, that passionate awareness cannot be the norm or we would be exhausted. Relationships grow in the daily fluctuations of emotional intensity, and also in the rhythms of presence and absence, words and silence. Thomas Merton, an inveterate writer of words and a brilliant converdationalist and a naturally gregarious man, struggled to fulfil his vocation as a Trappist Monk. He once said, with some irony, "Words are the sounds that interrupt my silence."

In Listening to God, Renita Weems is giving as honest an account as she can of what the silence and felt absence of God might mean, and how it feels. She has come out of the other side of guilt and feeling a failure as if those times of winter were her fault, and God's purpose is that it should always be summer. In a poem that reads like a Psalm, she tells of how she has come to understand that in the waiting is our growing, in the silence is our learning, in God's absence our heart can learn to grow fonder, or come to terms with the truth that God is not a comfort confectionery, but One whose presence need not be registered emotionally.

 

I usedta bow,

now I stand

before God's throne

 

I usedta close my eyes,

now I stare

straight ahead.

 

I usedta do what was expected,

now I do what I must

to make this faith

faithful to me.

 

I usedta be afraid of God,

now I take my chances

and wait

and wait

tapping my feet,

listening for God.

.....

There is a world of wisdom and self-knowing in those words. They are wrought out of a long wrestling with God's closeness and distance, God's words and God's silences. And they have a life-giving pastoral hopefulness for folk like the rest of us who try tive up to expectations of our own and not God's making.

When God is Silent Don't Assume It's Your Own Fault.

I have always found theological autobiography both fascinating and rewarding. When a theologian takes time to reflect on the meaning of their life, and to critically evaluate what they have thought, said, taught and written, I have sensed that in the articulation of such self-criticism both writer and reader have the chance to grow.

This was true for me when, a few years ago, I read Renita Weems' volume, Listening for God. A Minister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt. I'm re-reading it. I first came across Weems in her commentary on Song of Songs in the New Interpreter's Bible. Not everyone who reviewed it liked it. Weems is an outspoken and thoughtful feminist, and her interpretation of the Song is likewise shaped by her perspective as a woman. Why that should be a 'problem', I'm not sure. Most commentaries on the Song have been by men and presumably written from a masculine perspective. Anyway, what we have in her book is the honesty and integrity of a scholar who has had to live in the male dominated world of church and academia as a black woman theologian. The book is an eye opener, and a moving testimony that comes with the force of an argument on behalf of those who struggle with faith and doubt, hope and despair, blessing and loss, and still hold on.

Listening for God is the disposition of the person trying to hear, wanting to know, seeking for truth, and sometimes encountering only silence. And that silence may not mean the absence of God, nor does it reassure of God's presence; it is ambiguous, creating a tension between the longing of the soul and that for which the soul longs. Early in the book we get a sense of what she is talking about, and the first sound of a voice that speaks with honest to God openness about God. She links silence to intimacy, discerning a rhythm of intensity followed by distance, passion followed by withdrawal, in the most meaningful exchanges of our lives.

"The long silence between intimacies, the interminable pause between words, the immeasurable seconds between pulses, the quiet between epiphanies, the hush after ecstasy, the listening for God -- this is the spiritual journey, learning how to live in the meantime, between the last time you heard from God and the next time you hear from God." (25)

The rest of the book is an exploration and an exposition of her own life and those same rhythms of faith and doubt, presence and absence, blessing and loss, assurance and questioning, healing and hurt. She quotes what she calls an intrepid psalm, one of those texts that feels just like that moment when you thought you'd turned the shower to warmer but turned it the wrong way and the cold jets ruin your comfort zone.

As a deer yearns

for flowing streams,

so I yearn

for you, my God.

I thirst for God,

for the living God;

where can I go to see

the face of God?

I have no food but tears,

day and night,

as all day long I am taunted,

"Where is your God?"

This is a book that takes yearning and longing, love and belonging, presence and separation, seriously. Renita Weems is a minister, a professor of biblical studies, an African American woman, and one who has walked through as many valleys of deep darkness as she has still waters and green pastures. As a theologian and a preacher, and an expert on the biblical text, she is expected to be a good guide on the journey; but she confesses that she too gets lost, doesnlt recognise the landscape, becomes uncertain about the direction and the destination.

And here's her take on those times when God is silent: "I didn't know that just because I;d lost my enthusiasm for the spiritual journey disn't mean thatt I'd lost my way on the spiritual journey." That's the whole point. To journey by faith means sometimes going out to a place that we know not where. If God is silent, then we walk on, and listen, and pay attention to the glimpses and hints, the unlooked for and unexpected, the ordinary and the routine, and in that mix of life as we live it trust on that God is there. The down to earth truth is that God's presence is sometimes to be discerned not in the obviously spiritual, but in the even more obviously mundane, "the din of a hungry toddler screaming from the backseat in rush hour traffic."

This is a book for those of us familiar with spiritual longing, restless in our questioning and thinking, hungry for what is real, substantial and sustaining for mind and heart, as we walk the sometimes puzzling and risky road that is our life. Weems comes to accept that confusion and doubt are not wrong, they are as normal as when we feel sure and confident. The rhythms of emotion and mind, the changing circumstances of life, our own inner growing and changing, the chemistry of our bodies and the biosphere of our inner lives are all part of what makes us who we are and gives colour to the life we live. When God is silent it is seldom our fault; guilt is an attempt to explain what in fact needs no explanation. God is silent just now, so what? So listen, look, and find those other ways God communicates, often through others.

Come Holy Spirit Come

Looking for hymns about Pentecost I came across this one which goes to the tune Diademata (Crown him with many crowns).

It's a good modern take on the Veni Sancte Spiritus, and invokes the Spirit to invade our space, touch our common life, and renew the face of the earth in the slow, patient, determined coming of peace and justice. This time of year I have yet another look at that great book about the Holy Spirit, The Go-Between God by John V Taylor. Innovative theology remaining faithful to the Spirit's rootedness in the Triune life of God, and and love-driven to a creative mobility within and upon creation.

Come, Holy Spirit, come!

Inflame our souls with love,

transforming every heart and home

with wisdom from above.

Let none of us despise

the humble path Christ trod,

but choose, to shame the worldly wise,

the foolishness of God.

 

All-knowing Spirit, prove

the poverty of pride,

by knowledge of the Father’s love

in Jesus crucified.

And grant us faith to know

the glory of that sign,

and in our very lives to show

the marks of love divine.

 

Come with the gift to heal

the wounds of guilt and fear,

and to oppression’s face reveal

the kingdom drawing near.

Where chaos longs to reign,

descend, O holy Dove,

and free us all to work again

the miracles of love.

 

Spirit of truth, arise:

Inspire the prophet’s voice:

Expose to scorn the tyrant’s lies,

and bid the poor rejoice.

O Spirit, clear our sight,

all prejudice remove,

and help us to discern the right,

and covet only love.

 

Give us the tongues to speak

the word of love and grace

to rich and poor, to strong and weak,

in every time and place.

Enable us to hear

the words that others bring,

interpreting with open ear

the special song they sing

 

Come, Holy Spirit, dance

within our hearts today,

our earthbound spirits to entrance,

our mortal fears allay.

And teach us to desire,

all other things above,

that self-consuming holy fire,

the perfect gift of love.

The Best Holiday Read You'll Find This Year

This book is a rich combination of biography and autobiography, witha  narrative plot that is a quest story, laced with occasional interludes of self-reflection and examined-life episodes, a journal of living close to nature, a confessional exercise of increasing self knowledge - and much more. It's a remarkable achievement.

From page one Raynor Winn brings us into the life she shares with her husband of 32 years, their children just grown up and left, and we enter the story as catastrophe, 'a tsnumai of bad things' hit them in the face. Her husband is diagnosed with a terminal illness which cannot be cured, is not easily treated and therefore is difficult to manage. Within days they lose a civil court case that costs them their home, their farm and all that they had built together over those thirty two years. And the case was brought by a friend they trusted, and involved a betrayal of that trust and the lacerating knowledge that they lost on a technicality.

What to do? Homeless, bankrupt, facing serious illness deprived of house, security, money and those core essentials for those facing the full force of life gone wrong, a sense of home, of familiar place, gathered memories and known people. The book takes us into the fear and misery of those first days, and then we realise, to our relief; this isn't misery literature about sad lives, it's an account of two people's defiance, resilience, courage, and reckless way of finding and testing out who they are and could be. Sitting under a stair cupboard as the bailiffs knock on the door, Ray finds a guide book to The Salt Path round Land's End, 650 miles of it. And they decide they'll walk out the house, get whatever gear they can afford, get on a bus, and start walking. The plan is to camp wild, to live on minimum and sporadic benefits, and just keep walking.

The idea is insane, and more than once on their long walk they admit it must look like that, and sometimes feels like that. The consultant's advice was take it easy, rest, make the best of each day. Instead they decided to go on a walking expedition along one of the most demanding walks in England. The book is the account of that walk.

The descriptions of land and geology, climate and sea, badgers and seagulls, people and places, changing moods and moments, are held together in a narrative that is never self-pitying though honest about pain and hurt and loss. But the dominant mood is determination to hope; it is clear that these two people decided to live, repeatedly to choose hope, and opted for freedom. No one can say to them, "Well that's easy for you to do". If they did the answer would likely be, "Well, we've nothing to lose, we already lost it!"

I am not a great fan of confession literature as such; too often they become self-congratulatory, giving accounts of enhanced competence, exaggerating to impress, or making a big deal of what life brings their way as if bad stuff never happened to other people. This book is different. These are likeable, honest, vulnerable folk. The escapades camping wild, the hunger and deprivation of having no money, the relinquishing of dignity, make for engrossing and at times moving reading. Then there is the awareness as we read, that these two people, homeless and near peniless, are on a journey on the coast, on an internal journey of self discovery, and are doing so in a society that can often be complacently unaffected by people having a hard time and struggling to make life work.  They encounter kindness and callousness, friendship and snobbery, some who understand and more who were just bewildered or patronising.

So do yourself a favour and read this book. And if you are engaged in pastoral ministry read it alert to the important insights these two walkers offer into suffering, grief, and loss, and the example they set of resilience and of faithful friendship over decades. And as you walk with them you overhear hopes and fears being talked out loud, and you follow the footsteps of love that walks along with and beside each other, no matter what. This is theology with boots on, with a cheap haversack and even cheaper sleeping bag. It is travelling light, but for weighty reasons. And I think you'll come to like Ray and Moth, and be glad you are allowed to look so intimately into their troubles and ways of dealing with them. The book is a gem. 

Seasoned Timber; A Metaphor of Christian Maturity.

This old railway sleeper has been recycled as a strainer post. I first came across it in 1978 on holiday and walking along the Inverbervie to Gourdon coastal path. Since well before then it has held the wire tension of the fence, facing the sea only 50 metres away. I love old weathered wood, seasoned timber. Looking at it today, running my fingers over the rough, scarred and cracked surface, wondering what tales it might tell of those who have walked this path, gazed on this sea, carried within them their own tensions and strains.

One of my favourite phrases, seasoned timber. It is one of the metaphors used by George Herbert to describe the soul's resilience, defiant presence in the face of storm or sunshine, core strength that holds the tensions and makes the fence. But at a cost, engraved on the face, that roughened surface of the wood itself a metaphor for those lines and features that give a face its character, and map on the surface the struggles of the soul.

One of the reasons I've spent so much time on the company of a metaphysical poet turned 17th Century country parson, is Herbert's use of such everyday objects as an old piece of weathered wood, 'seasoned timber'.

Standing beside this post today, and inwardly reciting the last verse of 'Virtue' I could feel on my fingertips decades of wear and tear, but aware too of the beauty of aged wood, and how the knots and cracks add to rather than subtract from the sum total of its character. In other words the character is engrained, the grain of the wood mapping the long erosion and shaping of wind, rain, frost and sun. And I became aware that who I am is equally shaped by erosive forces of wind and rain, frost and sun, or their equivalents of struggle and tears, sorrow and joy, seasoned timber.  

Herbert's imagination is of timber that 'never gives', absorbs force, takes the strain. That can mean so many things - to live without pressure warping our integrity; to bear stress without splitting; to survive intact and strong through the four seasons; this is about virtue, that quality of character that comes from countless daily choices of the good when that which was less good was more attractive, advantageous or less costly. So I contemplate those photos of seasoned timber, remember the feel of the weathered contours and worn surfaces, and marvel at the ways God shapes and forms us towards his image in Christ.

Virtue, George Herbert

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright
The bridal of the earth and sky:
The dew shall weep thy fall tonight,
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eyes:
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie:
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal.
Then chiefly lives.

Arthur C McGill and A Book That May Make You Change Your MInd.

I have a predilection for thin theological books. I don't mind the substantial, weighty, 'need a desk to read them' kind of volumes. Some of the heavy weights are amongst my closest friends on the shelves. But there's a comforting and subversive satisfaction in having a three foot shelf packed with more than sixty books, each of which is worthy of more of our time and effort than many a weightier tome.

It would be fun to make a list of my dozen favourite thin theological books; thin in size and page numbers, not content. For now I want to introduce one of those slight and slim books that I'm so glad to have read and to own.

Just before that, it's worth reflecting on what it means to 'own' a book. You buy it and you possess it. That's the book as artefact. But then you read the book and you can never unread it. The words pass through your mind but some of them stick; ideas are awakened and the scenery of your inner world is ever so slightly, but now and then significantly, changed. In the process of reading, the reading person changes; in other words reading is a transformative process that enlivens the intellect, pushes the imagination, educates the conscience and ultimately shapes the character from which flows action and behaviour.

Books that open up new horizons, give birth to new ideas, question unexamined assumptions, stimulate imagination and persuade towards new discoveries of truth, such books do something crucial for our growth and inner health - they help us change our mind. Now that too is a telling phrase, 'changing your mind'. Any book that changes the way we think, provokes deeper thought, makes us see the world differently, is a gift that shoves us out of our cosy comfort zone into the cold, fresh daylight in which we see new things and are astonished at what we didn't know we didn't know. To change my mind is to see further, deeper, clearer; and in the light of that new insight the world is different, and such new discoveries compel me to revise my place and purpose in that world.

All of this, a thin book can accomplish.And Mcgill's is such a book. This is one of the most theologically perceptive books about power that I know. When power becomes demonic, that is, when power is about domination, exploitation, possession and life lived at the expense of others, the result in human life is violence, destructive conflict and systemic injustice. In short, suffering. Widespread, extreme and often avoidable suffering caused by the dominant will to power is the problem of our age, argues McGill. Now he was writing this in 1968, but 50 years down the line the book reads like a commentary on a world being racked by powerful systemic forces, power centred personalities and politicians, weakening of institutions that have sought to contain, restrain and reduce abuse of military and political power. McGill, before the phrase became theological currency was identifying the baleful, insinuating, pervasive realities of "structural sin", systemic, institutional, cultural influences which diminish freedoms, dominate and threaten human societies, and give rise to real evils, violence and consequent suffering.

His analysis of violence leads him to the unfashionable term 'demonism', which he believes is the spiritual reality of our day. Those pages exposing and exploring 'the demonic as the decisive form of evil'' are a potent antidote to those who would dismiss the those realities Paul described as 'principalities and powers', and as 'spiritual wickedness in high places'. This critique of evil has to be read in the age of Trump and Putin, the rhetoric of 'locked and loaded",denials of ecological crisis, fake news and media generated dread, Cambridge analytica and the harvesting of personal data as a weapon of persuasion. It is astonishingly prescient. At the centre of McGill's argument is a concept of power explained as a spectrum. "At opposing ends of the spectrum lie two powers - demonic power that is violent, destructive and dominative, and the power of God that is creative, totally open, self giving and expansive."

The power of God is understood by McGill, not in philosophical categories of omnipotence, hierarchy, imposition or dominance. The power of God is the power revealed in Jesus, who is the human embodiment of the inner life of the Triune God, eternity manifest in history. Service, not domination is God's modus operandi. The contrast between the power of evil as the power to kill, and the power of God as the power to give life could not be more stark.

The contrast between power as domination and power as the willingness to serve is a telling ultimatum to 21st Century post-postmodern cultures and peoples. Relinquishing power as influence over, power as domination of, power as possession of, or power as unquestioned right to self-assertion, is an approach radically at odds with the way the world is currently constructed. Such a concept of power, as service, is unlikely to catch on as the life aspiration of those who buy into a culture of possession, status, ambition and self-absorption in the big project of being me at all costs. But power is a reality in the world of human affairs, and here is Mcgill's approach in two sentences: "Because people today feel the impact of evil chiefly in terms of abusive power, they are asking about God chiefly in terms of his redemptive power. And in the churches they hear very little on this theme." (50)

That is where theology comes in. The victory of Christ is not power conquest, but suffering love. The crucifixion celebrates human power to kill; the resurrection demonstrates and celebrates God's power of life over death, the power of love over violence, and the power of self-giving to challenge self-will, self-interest and most of the other composite nouns qualified by that elusive reality of the self at the centre of each human's being. 

This isn't a book to summarise. It needs to be read, slowly. Its construal of God as Triune interchange of giving and receiving takes time to register as the contradiction of all our human drivenness towards self-preservation and the success of project 'me'. No, it isn't arguing for self-negation, but for a recognition that we are each both givers and receivers, capable of being there for and with each other rather than against each other.  Jesus has shown us who God is, how God expresses power, what love looks like when it takes on the principalities and powers.

I offer one quote from a book that is like this on nearly every page:

"Jesus alone is our true neighbour. He comes to us as a Samaritan might come to a Jew. On the surface he is simply not impressive enough to satisfy us. And yet he heals our deepest wounds and brings us the gift of eternal life. From the world's viewpoint, he comes in a broken and contemptible form, incapable of preserving even himself. He is not powerful in terms of his title and function...He is only powerful - but sumpremely powerful - in the life that he gives to men and women, healing their human sickness and opening to them the gates of paradise. He so fully restores them that they are enabled to become his servants, and in his name may be compassionate to others as he has been to them. He so heals them that by his power they too can go and do likewise...God himself has given us Jesus Christ as our neighbour." (110-111)