Living Wittily

Not Quite Random Reflections on Pebbles on the Beach.

It takes a long time to make a pebble. And a lot of friction. You need water, sand, and renewable, repetitive lapidary motion. It takes megajoules of energy. But gradually the pebbles take on shape, and the colours settle into patterns and tones, enhanced by the wetness. The beach is a place of slowly worked transformation.

These stones weren't just lying around like this, though they were near each other. Two of them were already there, and as the waves washed over them I placed another two from a foot or two away. It doesn't matter which is which.

I had been thinking about community, that mixture of coming together and bringing together that is human friendship, neighbourliness, various people in their diversity mutually complementing each other. So I brought these four together for a group photo.

As a pastor in a church you come to realise there are those who just happen to be there, been there for years. Then there are those who intentionally come, or recently arrived. Others come rolling in with the next wave. They are differently coloured and shaped and they have come from very different places. But by powers beyond their control they find themselves together, and find each other. They are shaped by friction and moved by waves that come from God knows where.

No attempt at symmetry, no tidy presupposed pattern of arrangement, just four very different pebbles brought into proximity. Which one am I? Where and what did I come from? What gives me my shape, and the colour or character that runs right through all that I am? Reflecting on how a Christian community begins, and exists, grows and declines, changes and is transformed, there is a sense of the divine undertow, the providence that works through our freedoms to bring new opportunities, new movements and directions, and yes, new neighbours we are called to be alongside. 

So I chose four stones. But they were already there, they are what they are, not what I want them to be or would like to make them. Not my call. Indeed, not my calling. My call is to respect the uniqueness, but also to enable each to find a position and place of belonging that honours the story of their journey. There is something non-negotiably given in each of these wave-washed and sand-shaped stones, thrown onto the beach from wherever they have come. But there. And so too each person who is part of a Christian community. There is, likewise, something non-negotiably given in this person, who has arrived here at this time in this place. The divine undertow has pulled them, and rolled them, and shaped them to this point. And here they are, as the gift they are.  

R S THomas: Faith as Nailing Our Questions to an Untenanted Cross

In Church

Often I try
To analyse the quality
Of its silences. Is this where God hides
From my searching? I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil. It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate. Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour. The bats resume
Their business. The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

                                    R S Thomas

Faith is no easy trust for this poet. R S Thomas was no pietist, nor was he one for whom dogma provided emotional ballast or intellectual comfort. Yet for all his complaints and hesitations, his metaphysical doubts and theological impatience with tidiness and certainty, there is the glint of steel in his words. He neither claims easy faith nor surrenders easily to the felt absence of ground for faith. "Is this where God hides from my searching?, he asks, reversing the expectations of those who come to church to seek God that haply they might find him.

The vocabulary is laden with previous disappointments; silence, waiting, failed animation, shadows, uneasiness, darkness, emptiness, and that final theological clanger, 'untenanted cross'. This is faith so often disillusioned it comes close to resignation, and regret if not resentment. Thomas walks the via negativa, from church porch to altar, as he has done before, often, time after time.That's why the poem reads as a long pondered questioning, frequently undergone, of what the priest is about, serving an unresponsive God, in a building "prayers have failed to animate".

"Often I try to analyse the quality of its silence...I have stopped to listen". Silence varies in quality, and purpose, and explanation. There is the silence of absence, no one there to communicate with; the silence of mystery when the question asked has no yes or no answer; the silence of the vigil, waiting with expectation and no guarantee of fulfilment. Then late in the poem the silence is disturbed:

There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

"The sound of a man breathing" has a primordial referent, going all the way back to Genesis, the Creation, and a garden when God breathed into the first human and he became a living soul. Breath and prayer mingle in the cold church, like an exhalation in the frosty air. "Prayer is the Christian's vital breath" as well as the "soul's sincere desire", in Montgomery's hymn. And prayer is "God's breath in man returning to his birth" according to George Herbert's sonnet, which Thomas would know by heart. And Thomas was too steeped in Scripture and liturgy for the sound of a man breathing to mean less than 'the burden of a sigh'.

The interrogative mood of so much of R S Thomas's poetry can become irksome to those whose sense of God is more obviously felt, more easily experienced, and even more easily explained. But for those whose disposition is less sure and sanguine, and whose questions are more persistent and unsettling, Thomas describes a spirituality of intellectual struggle and chronic discontent with questions too easily settled. Which brings us to those last words, "an untenanted cross". Jesus is depositioned, and deposited in the grave. One by one the poet nails his questions to a cross on which the work is done, but the fruit has not appeared. In the liminal time of Easter Saturday, the priest struggles to understand the meaning of atonement without resurrection. One by one he nails his questions, but there is nobody there, he is testing his faith on emptiness.

In Church is a poem for our 21st Century. All over European and North American society, the church is losing its grip, Christian faith is in recession, and the faithful struggle to arrest decline, and to maintain credibility, and resist the undertow of a growing disillusionment. This too is a body our prayers have failed to animate, as the Church and the churches are pushed to the margins of a culture no longer all that interested in, because no longer in need of, the Christian God with the human face of Jesus. And we have questions of our own, if we have the courage to ask them and the integrity to refuse that false optimism which is denial. It seems that the cross is untenanted and faith is being tested on emptiness. But every instinct tells us to nail our questions, one by one, on the untenanted cross. Because there will soon be an untenanted grave. "It's Good Friday but Sunday is coming", as Tony Campolo once quipped.

And Thomas knew this. In another poem, 'Suddenly', he looks at the cross once more. Still untenanted, the cross is the place where life suddenly erupts.The poem ends:

The gamblers
at the foot of the unnoticed
cross went on with
their dicing; yet the invisible
garment for which they played
was no longer at stake, but worn
by him in this risen existence. 

It occurred to me reading these two poems, that 'In Church' is a description of an interior where air recomposes itself into vigil, there is the silence of the grave, and shadows cast by receding light, and then there is the sound of a man breathing. The cross is untenanted because the one who died there breathes "in this risen existence." And that's the thing with Thomas. He nails his questions to the cross, but eventually finds himself heading towards a garden, with a tomb, where he will test his faith with its emptiness.

The Station of the Cross is one of a triptych, personal gifts from a personal friend, the Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart.

Eugene Peterson: The Contemplative Pastor Who Practiced What He Preached

The news today that Eugene Peterson has died will be greeted by thousands of pastors with a mixture of reactive sadness that his life has ended, but also with enduring gratitude that it was lived the way he lived it. Eugene Peterson was a pastor, never anything else. In the second half of his life he became a teacher of spirituality at one of the premier Evangelical seminaries in North America, but the person who became a professor was first, and foremost a pastor. His professorship was merely the medium through which he continued to be a pastor and spiritual guide to hundreds of students and thousands of pastors.

I met Eugene Peterson only once. It's worth telling the story. I was booked to go to the Conference at St Ninians in Crieff, in Central Scotland, in September 1997. I had to cancel due to the sudden death of my mother in law. The day after the funeral, which was also the day after the conference in Crieff finished, I phoned St Ninians and asked if Eugene was still there. He was, and when he heard I was willing to divert to come through Crieff just to meet him, he rearranged his timetable and asked if I could be in Crieff by 11.00am for coffee. Yes I could, and yes I did.

I wanted to thank him for his books, and for the way they had reshaped my thinking, realigned my heart and reconfirmed that the calling of a pastor is fulfilled by faithfulness and pursued in disciplined love for Christ and His church. A long obedience in the same direction, working the angles, being a contemplative pastor, choosing five smooth stones for pastoral work, answering God - what I mean is these and otther titles of his books rang with a clear pastoral intent. If I had to choose which of his books have meant most I'd be hard pushed.

It was a sunny cold day, so we sat on the bench in front of St Ninians and talked theology, pastoral care and spirituality. His appreciation of my own book on evangelical spirituality was one of my more humbling moments, and I suspect his way of deflecting my admiration and indebtedness to his own writing ministry. Because amongst the most obvious characteristics of this man was his self-deprecation, not in false modetsy, but in genuine Gospel humility. We spent an hour or so, we prayed together and he commended our family as we sorrowed in bereavement, we shook hands and parted.

But not before he went into the St Ninian's bookstore, bought one of his own books and inscribed it as a memento of our conversation. It's one of those moments, and one of those gifts, that has taken on increasing significance over the years. Now reading it and remembering Eugene Peterson is a sacramental act, bringing back so much of the sense and sensitivity of someone who embodied so much of what over the years I have aimed at. So that is my personal debt.

But many others knew him better and met him oftener, and they are the more blessed for it. But amongst his most important gifts were the books he wrote. Once he began to teach on spirituality and on pastoral care in Vnacouver, many of the themes which enriched and expanded our understanding of ministry began to recur, so that his later work tended to be derivative from his earlier work. That isn't a criticism so much as a recognition that certain key principles and stated priorities would always find their way into whatever he wrote on pastoral care, prayer, preaching, spiritual direction, and pastoral counsel.

His writing and his thought, indeed his way of thinking, was thoroughly biblical, drenched in scripture and mixed with wider reading across the classics of literature, theology and biblical studies. He was a poet and a lover of poetry. He lived in the Psalms and quarried in the Prophets, walked in the Gospel stories and cultivated those occasionally tetchy and pastorally oriented letters of Paul. And out of all this Peterson wrote about the ministry, the pastoral life, the ways of prayer, the psychology and spirituality of Christian experience, and he did so as one who knew he was as fallible, vulnerable and in need of grace as the rest of us who read his words.

But read them we did. And ministers who were bruised, disillusioned, exhausted, wounded, bored, anxious, defensive, or confused, were helped to get things in proportion, to see all the down sides in the light of eternity, and to recover a hopefulness that depended not on their skill, technique or eagerness to fulfil expectations, but on the Gospel of a grace that overwhelms, a wisdom that seems foolish, and a love that undergirds and underwrites every instance of ministry offered in weakness. And alongside the reorientations and return to true vocation, Peterson taught the disciplines that sustain ministry, that cultivate the soul to a fertile tilth and a suitable depth to contain and nurture more of the eternal love of God in Christ.

Bible reading and long pondering of the text aiming at a familiarity of habit to know the text. But not as cognitive control or academic curiosity, more as a pharmacist knows medicine, or a fly-fisher knows the flies, the river and the light, or a driver knows a road that is familiar but still, not to be treated with familiar complacency. Such reading presupposed long and persevering prayer, and the cultivated trustfulness in the ministry of the Holy Spirit who takes of the things of Jesus and brings them to remembrance, leads us to deeper apprehension of truth, and equips us with gifts we never knew we had.

If I were to chose one book from the plethora of options, I couldn't. Yes I think Reversed Thunder the finest writing he ever did tied to a biblical text. But what about Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work and Working the Angles as fundamental texts of any pastoral theology presupposing a Christ centred spirituality? His longest series of volumes on a spiritual theology are his most recent, and probably now his best known because most recently in print. But they gather so much from those earlier books wrought out in the workshop of being a pastor in the community of Christ the King. And these earlier books I treasure because they have the footprints of my pastoral journeying all over them.

Eugene Peterson never sought fame, or the accolades of grateful readers. But in evangelical circles his work is well known, and amongst ministers a trusted resource. The vision of ministry he commended and enacted, and out of which came so much of his best and most durable writing, is now in turn enacted and incarnated in the many whom he taught through his writings and in Regent's College, Vancouver.

For myself, I owe deep unpayable debts to this man. Not that he ever sought or wanted to be seen as a planet around which acolytes orbit; and in faithfulness to his own teaching what he would want more than anything else is for ministers to minister out of those deep places of contemplative prayer and faithful study and passion fuelled vocation, nourished by Bible, community and the intimacy and majesty of prayer. From early on in my ministry, I have been privileged to have encountered a mind and a ministry that does something very hard to do; makes you want to keep on being a pastor, a servant of Christ and of the Body of Christ.

"Love your enemy" sounds like a moral oxymoron from anyone other than Jesus.

Jesus spoke about rain too. He didn't seem too bothered about getting wet. Rain didn't dampen his mood. In fact the one time he spoke about rain he spoke about sunshine in the same breath. What rain and sunshine have in common is that they are indiscriminate. If you're outside in rain you'll get wet just as surely as if you're outside in sun you'll feel the warmth and get your vitamin D replenished.

There are times when Jesus sees deeply into the surface of things. He sees and states the obvious and changes people's worldview. Which is the start of changing the world. Well into the Sermon on the Mount, on the other side of the Beatitudes, he says "Love your enemies." We're used to reading that, yet his words are still unsettling, even upsetting. For those first hearers that imperative "Love your enemies" pulled the carpet from a way of life embedded in God's law. Not so much a reinterpretation, but a flat contradiction. 

Don't hate, love. Don't curse, pray. Later, in one of the most explicit echoes of Jesus in all of Paul's letters, he will speak the same nonsense to the Christians in Rome. (Romans 12.14, 17-21)  And it is nonsense, in the technical sense of not making sense. What makes sense to us is what we are used to, the familiar, those experiences we have come to understand, predict and which contribute to the stability and smooth running of our lives. We live by the values we've gotten used to. Then Jesus asks the impossible, give up what you're used to. The pragmatism of the everyday and ordinary, the familiar and the secure, our long established comfort zones, Jesus simply turned outside in, upside down, back to front. Or use any other phrase for radical reversal of expectations. And then, that scary way Jesus took the responsibility for a whole series of apparently irresponsible words, "You have heard that it was said....but I say to you..." These are amongst the most revolutionary words Jesus ever spoke within people's hearing, and they forced a reorientation of life for those who heard them.

"Love your enemy sounds" like a moral oxymoron from anyone other than Jesus. But why? What's the reason for such unrealistic commands?  Loving your enemy seems like an act of emotional self-harm. Love your neighbour makes sense. Neighbourliness is built on all those instinctive and long established principles of human community like mutual protection, reciprocity of gift, collaboration and co-operative action, communal sharing, agreed values and upholding the common good? You could almost define "enemy" as someone who rubbished all these social bonds and refused, or worse subverted by deceit or suppressed by force the very things that make people neighbourly. Which brings us back to rain.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

Why? Why love my enemy? Jesus gives one of those answers that shows why his Kingdom is not of this world, not even close. "So that you may be children of your Father in heaven." To be a child of God is to bear the family resemblance; to behave in ways reminiscent of God's purposes; to align our way of being with God's way of being God. What's God's way of being God? "He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust." Indiscriminate rain argues indiscriminate love. Neighbour or enemy, friend or persecutor, if they're out in the rain they get wet; if they encounter a Christian they get loved. Neighbour or enemy, friend or persecutor, if they're out in the sun they get warmed, and if they meet a Christian they encounter love.

Simple. It's the logic of a Kingdom that makes no sense in the world of eye for eye and tooth for tooth. It's a logic that seems plain daft in communities founded on quid pro quo, competitive advantages, trading and trade-offs, and long memories for wrongs awaiting payback. The logic of enemy love is a theo-logic. It requires a way of being that is enabled by God's grace and energised by God's love. The love of God in Christ, reproduced in the followers of Jesus is enacted, embodied in the practices of love - peacemaking, reconciliation, forgiveness, compassion, kindness, self-giving service. In short, love for enemy is Christlike love for the other, any other.

This makes me wonder if another approach to rain, to add to the options in the cartoon above, might be called "The Nazarene". Perhaps a picture of two people standing in a downpour, one with empty hands and outstretched arms waiting to greet the person with clenched fists and the body language of hostility. And as the rain falls on the just and the unjust, that gesture of love, goodwill and conciliation may turn the enemy's world upside down, inside out and back to front, and the result a changed worldview. Loving the enemy is a Copernican revolution in a relationship by which enemy becomes friend, and the shadow of hate is dispelled by the sun shining on the just and the unjust.

And therefore, Christians should now and then walk in the rain, quietly praying those words of Jesus, while reviewing the list of those we dislike and who dislike us, those whose past offense is in danger of hardening into enmity, those for whom we have chosen not to care. Living in Scotland such opportunities come round regularly - it rains often. And if we go out we get wet; and if our enemy goes out they get wet too. So, if we should meet during a walk in the rain, seeking to be children of our Father who is in heaven, our love learns to be as indiscriminate, as persistent, as life laden with potential, as rain. Rain therefore, is a sacrament of that grace that pours into our lives in uncountable drops, soaking us with all that is needed for life, and life in all its abundance.

"Imaginative reconstruction, earthed in erudition. Review of N T Wright. Paul. A Biography.

Paul. A Biography, Tom Wright (London: SPCK, 2018).  464 pages, £19.99.

James Denney once said to his friend J P Struthers that he wanted a break from writing about the apostle Paul because “There are other interesting things in this universe.” Those familiar with the writing of N T Wright must be wondering what can be left to say about Paul given his own long list of publications dating from his Tyndale Colossians commentary now over thirty years in print.

Since then Wright has produced a small library of Pauline scholarship which includes a major commentary on Romans, several mid-level state of play treatments of Paul, and dozens of essays and articles dealing in detail with Pauline themes and texts. Most recently his magnum opus, Paul and the faithfulness of God, and the recent collected essays, Pauline Perspectives, supplemented by Paul and His Recent Interpreters gather together his most important work on Paul. This is apart from other published research and a whole range of popular and mid-range volumes exploring various theological themes from Kingdom of God, to Christian hope, ethics and biblical interpretation, and including a complete series of daily study New Testament commentaries.

This book is not intended as yet another tendentious reconstruction of Pauline life and thought, although the above titles demonstrate Wright’s credentials to do so. Instead he is looking for the man behind the texts; he wants to make historical, emotional and theological sense of the man who more than any other gave decisive shape to Christian thought and practice in those first decades of the Christian church, and for two millennia thereafter. Paul is not to be pigeon-holed either as hero or villain, but to be understood as a converted Jew, whose life work was within Jewish and non-Jewish communities in the context of the Roman Empire and within the cultural milieu of Greco-Roman civilisation.

The book reads like a well-researched novel. Lucid, imaginative, rooted in long maturing thought, informed by encyclopaedic knowledge of sources, history and alternative viewpoints, and driven by a narrative with built in impetus and interest, this book could  easily replace the meaty novel you planned as the summer holiday read! If it does, you will be taken into a world of politics and philosophy, religious intrigue and change; and into the smaller worlds of house churches made up mainly of the small and marginal people, but with influential and well-off members too. And you will also be pulled into the local politics and problems of those churches, with their personalities and characters, their plots and sub-plots, and each of them a context  in which Paul either had influence or sought to be an influence in his mission to spread the gospel of Jesus crucified and risen. The “brilliant mind and passionate heart” of Paul is complex, challenging, resistant to preconceived theological patterns and interpretive grids. Paul, says Wright, would be a high maintenance friend, but the rewards would be amply rewarding.

Near the end of the book Wright expresses Paul’s gospel and ethics in a nutshell:

“God will put the whole world right at the last. He has accomplished the main work of that in Jesus and his death and resurrection. And through the gospel and spirit, God is now putting people right, so that they can be both examples of what the gospel does, and agents of further transformation in God’s world.” (Italics original)

Much of this book is a contextualised exposition of Paul’s gospel and ethics in those terms, from Galatia to Rome, from Corinth to Ephesus, and many a place in between. The chapters on Ephesus and Corinth, for example, are scintillating accounts of what Paul was about and why, the problems he confronted and those problem people who confronted him. Throughout the volume Wright opens up so many new ways of thinking about Paul’s mission strategies, pastoral challenges and passionately pursued goals, as he worked from within and often from a distance with such varied communities in all the overlapping social and cultural complexities of the first century Mediterranean.

For example Corinth fixated with celebrity culture, and dismissive of a vulnerable and quite ordinary apostle; or temple ridden Ephesus with multiple gods, idolatry as the norm, and the call to Christians to discern what they could and couldn’t eat, and in Galatia who to eat with and who to refuse to eat with. Wright is like a brilliant documentary narrator, observing behaviour, explaining local customs, being both critical and questioning of what is going on in order to understand better, the motives and responses of the main players. 

Central to Paul’s gospel, because central to his own experience and subsequent thought, is the transformative reality of Jesus, crucified, risen and Lord of the church. Jesus is the fulfilment of all that God purposes for his creation and its renewal.  

For Paul, “it was always Jesus: Jesus as the shocking fulfilment of Israel’s hopes; Jesus as the genuinely human being, the true “image”; Jesus the embodiment of Israel’s God – so that, without leaving Jewish monotheism one would worship and invoke Jesus  as Lord within not alongside, the service of the “living and true God”. (400)

The life work of N T Wright to date is distilled into this excellent biography of Paul. It does what good biographies do: it tells the story of the subject with fairness, verve and critical appreciation; it intrigues, poses questions, offers solutions to problem areas in the narrative; above all you come away from a good biography with a more informed, more sympathetic, and less prejudiced (positively or negatively) judgement of who he was and what he was about. Add to this the biographer’s  expertise in the life context, the cultural swirls and movements, the social and political pressures of change and conformity, within which the subject lived and moved and had his being, and you have a biography worth the time in reading about, and later, in pondering the wonder of that life.

However this is like no other book on Paul I have read. There is imaginative reconstruction, albeit earthed in erudition. As one highly significant example, the chapter on Paul’s Damascus experience is portrayed as very different from the classic conversion narrative. This isn’t so much an individual experience of regeneration, as a radical reorientation of worldview, a defining reversal of life’s meta-narrative for a zealous Jew whose zeal has just been flipped from enmity to Jesus and his followers, to apostle of the good news that Jesus is God fulfilling God’s eternal purposes for Israel and the world. Throughout the book Wright in similar fashion repeatedly pulls the rug from established, and as he would see it, too long unquestioned assumptions about what Paul was about, and why. 

The book has no footnotes to secondary studies, and no bibliography. If you’ve read Wright’s other work there are echoes and familiar themes, and you’ll recognise where his interpretation of Paul and Paul’s theology is contested, sometimes vigorously, by other scholars. But the absence of scholarly paraphernalia is deliberate on Wright’s part, and in my view a wise decision. What we have is a flowing narrative, richly informed, long pondered, imagination mostly disciplined by textual rootedness, and with its own internal coherence. The result is a very satisfying and persuasive account of Paul, the human, fallible, mercurial ambassador of Christ, and of his gospel which starts and ends with Jesus, the one of whom Paul wrote with incendiary passion, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself….and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation.”   

Thinking about Teaching, and One of My Best Teachers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trees. A new alternative medicine called Psalmotherapy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographing Waves and Playing with Haiku

 

Lalique waves glisten
with translucent energy
while tumbling shorewards.

 

 

Waves and stepping stones

gladly welcome each other

above the shoreline.

 

 

Let waves demonstrate

alternative energy

is renewable.

Paw Prints in the Sand. An Alternative Take on that "Footprints" Poem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Singing our way back to faith, and health.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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