Living Wittily

Pentecost and Eucharist; The Fire and the Dove, The Bread and the Wine.

The idea for this tapestry came from I’m not sure where. But I do remember imagining a chalice touched with the fire of the Holy Spirit, and wondering what that might look like. From there I worked at the shape and colour of the chalice and decided it should be large, generous, dominating the scene, worked in small half cross stitch, but qualified and enriched by other images, particularly fire and the dove, two obviously biblical symbols of the Spirit.

I had considered olives for their oil used for anointing in biblical times, and one of the key emblems of the Spirit. The dove, however has a clear connection to Jesus’ baptism, and with the creation story as the Spirit moved upon the waters, hence its place above the chalice.

I also considered grapes, signifying the wine of the Eucharist but decided to make the wine dominant within the chalice, and close to a small portrayal of the cross. Thus the coming of the spirit in flames, the wine of the new covenant, the cross as the place of reconciliation, and all this set in a field of wheat with flowers, signifying both the bread of the Eucharist and the beauty of creation.

The flames were worked entirely at random with the colours chosen as I went along. The colours were deliberately strong and much more diverse than red and yellow flames. There seemed no reason that the flames at Pentecost should be limited to human perceptions, so the colours express the diversity of creation, the multiplicity of the work of the Spirit and the infinite possibilities of the creative, purposive and redemptive work of God.

The dove is white, a deliberate attempt at both emphasis and differentiation. The contrast between the wild power of the top half, and the much more ordered fruitfulness of the harvest field in the bottom half is an intended effect, though it was not what I first intended. It was trying to solve the problem of bread and wine that pushed me towards wheat and then my early years in the country and corn fields spangled with flowers suggested small, bright and understated beauty in the midst of the Eucharistic grain.

The borders have become a signature element in my tapestries. The allusion to the rainbow does not follow the colour spectrum but makes visible diversity and harmony, difference and complementarity. The inner gold is both light and the life sustaining fruit of sunlight, grain, and bread; the single red line around the border is evocative of the wine of the Eucharist, and the redeeming love that surrounds the whole of Creation.  

The entire work is an experiment in theology, a prolonged meditation on two theological realities which give definition and imagination to Christian living – the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist. I am expecting that this tapestry will mean more to me than to most others who might look at it – not only because I did it and therefore have much already invested in it; but because I am genuinely curious about the relationship between what we do at Holy Communion, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit who in Johannine theology, takes of the things of Christ and makes them known to us. 

Photographs in a Time of Pandemic 3. The Theatre of God's Glory.

Sometimes a photograph captures a mood. Six weeks into the lock down it was all becoming a bit claustrophobic. Partly that was because life had few options for change and stimulus, or new scenery with different horizons. Much more I think, from the missing of people, all kinds of people. From our son and wider family, our close friends and wider circle of folk whose company we enjoy frequently, to our church communities, and even the free interaction with others in shops, on the street, at the garage, we were missing people, painfully aware of an inner ache giving birth to loneliness and emotional bereavement. 

I hadn't used the phrase 'stir crazy' very much, until I realised that's what we were all going through: "restless or frantic because of confinement or routine." In fact it put me in mind of Cole Porter's song:

Oh give me land, lots of land, and the starry skies above
Don't fence me in
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love
Don't fence me in

Let me be by myself in the evening breeze
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees
Send me off forever but I ask you please
Don't fence me in

 

We are, of course, spoilt by where we live. Ten minutes walking takes us into countryside; just over an hour by car to Braemar, and in between Banchory, Aboyne and Ballater. And in between and all around any amount of walking. But it was all unavailable. As I stood half way up Keir Hill just behind where we stay, looking over the drystane dyke towards Loch Skene, I was aware that below me was tightly drawn, rusty barbed wire. When I knelt to take this picture I was aware of the stark barbed lines trisecting the photo. A wall, jaggy gorse, and barbed wire, a triple lock against easy movement in that direction. Yes, sometimes a photo captures a mood. 

 

But then, a change of perspective often changes the mood. This second photo was taken some way back from the first, and shows what was beyond the dyke, the gorse and the barbed wire. Distance seems to make a difference. The constraints are still there, just not so obviously in your face.

Looking over Loch Skene to the higher mountains of the Mounth, the barrier on the east of the Grampian mountain range. To stand looking across the Loch and into the distance, snow on the furthest mountain, and rapeseed just turning yellow a few miles away, was to encounter what was needed to lift the mood and open up the mind to new horizons. 

 

Calvin called this earth the theatre of God's glory. As in every theatre, you have to buy a ticket, take your seat and get into the story. Going for a walk up the hill is like heading out to the theatre, not knowing exactly what will be on, but trusting the director and producer to make it worth your while. 

Taking Photographs in a Time of Pandemic 2. The Distraction and Consolation of Birds.

One hundred yards from our front door is a rookery. It sits at this end of the local golf course, and their large high rise housing estate of nests is located amongst the Scots pines. You get used to them, their occasional squabbles with the local neds - the seagulls, their alarms when the buzzard flies too near, and the daily exit near dusk when they go wherever rooks go to roost. 

Rooks are amongst the best problem solvers. And what about this, rooks have been trained to pick up litter in a theme park in France! They have an unerring instinct for calculating weight bearing twigs. I've never seen one land on a twig and have to hop to another because it broke. From my study window they gather for what looks like a game of chicken, will this twig hold two of us?

My love of birds goes back to earliest days in Ayrshire, and my knowledge of them gleaned from my father, several older farm workers, Ladybird Books, I Spy Birds, The Observer's Book of Birds and The Observer Book of Bird's Eggs. Later I graduated to The AA Book of British Birds, and from there to whatever I could get my hands on at whatever library I joined. The satisfaction I've had identifying birds by sight, flight or call, down the years of my life has been one of the gentler joys and one of the great legacies of growing up on farms.

So when I have my camera, I look for birds. I don't have a sophisticated camera; it has limited zoom and no filters; it is now 10 years old; I'm reluctant to replace it for one that will almost certainly do better. But there are plenty brilliant photos which other people can take and put out there online. I'm looking for that moment when man and bird are far enough away to respect each others' space and near enough for a good look at each other. This blue tit came into the garden the day after lock down, a harbinger of hope, a fragile, flitting presence like a tiny angel with its own tentative annunciation, "All shall be well...I hope!"

Birds do that. They fly in and out of our lives, and if we take time to notice them, and pay attention to the gift they are, they can become therapy on wings. Throughout these weeks we have seen the usual suspects, but also the coal tit, black cap, red kite, skylark, yellowhammer, and wren. No photographs of these, just the memory, and the satisfaction of the brief encounter.

I have a Folio Society Volume of John Clare's Bird Poems, complete with woodcuts. He wrote in records, poems and journals the details of 147 species of British wild birds, and wrote the first full descriptions of 65 birds found in Northamptonshire alone. Clare was a farm labourer, an observer, a careful note taker and record keeper, his knowledge of the countryside, habitats and habits of British wildlife quite astonishing.

He suffered from severe mental illness, and much of his later life is sadly marred by increasingly severe mental ill health. Yet despite such long periods of illness, in the combination of minute and persistent observation, and poetic imagination and feel for words, he has given some of the most lyrical and accurate descriptions of birds and their nests anywhere in the English language.

On one of our walks we were under observation ourselves. High enough up to be safe, it looked down with complacent unconcern, bird watching from the bird's perspective. We decided not to risk walking beneath this super-kilo wood pigeon. But that sky, framing a sumo class pigeon, once again took me outside my own head to look at what is there all the time. It is ironic, and to my own loss, when I make so little time to notice, enjoy and simply celebrate life as gift too easily taken for granted.

Jesus did tell us to "Look at the birds of the air..." And that was in the context of human worry and anxious concern about tomorrow. "Your Heavenly Father knows, " Jesus said. Bird watching as open air therapy, self-care, ekstasis - being taken out of one's own head!  

Taking Photographs in a Time of Pandemic 1. Upheld by Roots Not Our Own.

When you are frightened you don't pay attention to much else going on around you, other than whatever it is that threatens you! Ever since late February when the world woke up to the seriousness of what was happening in China, we have lived with the reality of a new Coronavirus and a global pandemic. By March 23 the entire country went into lock down and that is now only changing, ever so slowly and with considerable caution, thank goodness. 

To be under house arrest for ten weeks is a restriction of freedom unprecedented in peace time, and not even known in this country in war time. With time to think, none of the usual social activities, work responsibilities or leisure diversions available, it was hardly a recipe for happiness. Exercise, but only once a day for up to an hour, became the one chance to break out of the horizons of our own living room and garden.

Add to that sense of confinement the growing addiction to daily briefings with their litany of distressing statistics; then as we watched and listened and learned, a growing sense of mismanaged strategies and missed opportunities. It was becoming clear this was going to be hard, as hard as anything we had faced together as a country for a long, long time.

Mix into all the above an increasing sense of personal impotence in the face of a threat that was invisible, deadly and loose out there, and the ingredients are all together for a breakdown in social cohesion and confidence. In such a constrained set of circumstances, a large space opened up in our minds, quickly filled with shape shifting shadows of worry, uncertainty, disorientation and trashed plans. So. How to survive a lock down, deal with the strong undercurrents of anxiety, reconfigure life around non-community when every instinct is to be with people in whose company we find strength, love and the resources to keep going?

For myself, I looked for solace where I have discovered it is often to be found - outside my own head. Every day we walked, we looked and listened, and I took photos. Some were quite good, some were naff, and a few were worth sharing with others. But the truth is, even the photos that "failed" were taken for a reason, or on a hunch, or because at the time that moment, or view, or object seemed worth hanging on to a little longer. I look at them now and on one level think they can be deleted without loss; at another level I realise this seemed worth the effort at the time, what did I sense or see there, then? 

Like a tree, using its branches to stretch out its claim on the space, an example of arboreal social distancing in a forest. Maybe. During these weeks we have walked often amongst trees. I find an almost biblical affection and affinity for trees. Maybe it goes back to childhood when so much of my time was spent climbing trees. Perhaps it's also the rich texture of biblical references to trees clapping their hands, growing beside rivers of water, and their leaves for the healing of the nations. So a photo with Scots pines, larch, hawthorn, rowan, gorse and broom, barely held in place by an ancient drystane dyke - the photo doesn't capture all of the joy and contentment, but enough to remember the lifting of the heart when looking at them. 

Whatever the reason I have found trees comfortable companions. Old trees have been there for perhaps a century or more, symbols of permanence, signs of the health of our natural world, an antidote to the toxins of human acquisitiveness which threatens our entire eco-system. When the worst of this is over, and we are free to be out and about again, I'll go where there are trees, and take time to sense deep, nourishing, stabilising roots beneath my feet. And be grateful.  

Hungry for People's Company, and Looking for Bread.

I wrote this Pastoral Letter for people whose faces and presence and voices I am missing. Their absence feels like a hunger that won't go away.

John 6.35.  Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

We pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” trusting God to nourish our bodies. But what feeds our hearts and strengthens our souls is Jesus himself. Our inner hungers of longing for love, waiting for hope, searching for meaning and life in its fullness, can only be satisfied when we come to Christ, and believe in him.

Amongst the most difficult experiences over these past weeks of lock down has been the loss of other people’s company, companionship and presence. We are nourished by relationships of love and affection, and we hunger for conversation face to face. To be with people who share our lives, laugh at our jokes, sympathise when life is difficult and who understand us, is one of the most human forms of inner nourishment.

That’s because over years of memories and friendship, talking and walking together, caring and taking an interest in each other, they have become the soil in which our lives have taken root. We hunger for that communion of spirit, and thirst for the presence of those in whose friendship, love and presence we grow and flourish.

Baptists don’t tend to talk much about the communion of saints. Yet our way of being the church is based on Paul’s idea of being the Body of Christ.  Each one of us is a member, joined together, muscle, joint and sinew, into a co-ordinated body with Christ as the head. Even when we are not together, we are joined by being in Christ and Christ in us, a communion of saints.

So, yes, social distancing makes our gatherings impossible for now, and will make them difficult for quite a while into the future when lock down is eased. But we are nourished by the bread of life, we belong to the Body of Christ, and though we hunger for each other’s company and fellowship, the Body is kept strong by the Spirit of the living Christ. Through all this disruption and interruption of our lives, the joints, sinews and muscles that join us are kept healthy by “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit.”

Reflection: My guess is we will never again take for granted the freedom to meet together as the Body of Christ. We will appreciate more than ever how much our congregational praise and singing strengthen our faith, and nurture the bonds of fellowship in Christ. The communion service will be a regular recalibrating of what is most important in our lives. When Jesus said, “I am the bread of life,” that wasn’t just a stated fact; it is an invitation, now, to belong within the Body of Christ, and to be nourished within the fellowship of Christ’s people.

Thickly Textured Thin Books. Guest Post: Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope

Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope.

Today's guest post is written by my friend Mo Gibbs. Mo is a married, busy mum of two, and a former Baptist minister and Youth Development Coordinator. She now works as a waitress in a busy restaurant. A coffee and book enthusiast, nothing pleases her more than a good book, good coffee and time spent chatting with friends! She has chosen SUCH a good book!

When I was first introduced to Joan Chittister’s book Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, my family were going through a major struggle.  Her words were like a balm to my soul.  Joan wrote with real honesty about her own struggle with not being able to progress in writing as she’d imagined, and through her writing allowed me a space to reflect on the struggle I was in and a way of beginning to process some of that.  Yet, her book wasn’t simply navel gazing in nature, as she tied it firmly into the story of Jacob, particularly his struggle at Peniel, allowing me to place myself within that story and begin to hear the hope that this struggle didn’t have the final word.  She writes near the beginning of the book:

…if we give up in the midst of struggle, we never find out what the struggle would have given us in the end.  If we decide to endure it to the end, we come out of it changed by the doing of it. … We dare the development of the self. … Life forges us in the struggle.[1]

Her words gave me a way to pause and space to encounter God.  It was by far the best book I read all that year, and I have been recommending it to others ever since, as well as reading more of her writing.

During this lockdown time though, I’ve revisited the book and re-read it.  I’m one of those people who marks books, who underlines and writes in margins and has a ‘code’ – which will make some folks smile and others cringe.  As I re-read the book out came the pencil, as this time there were new things that struck me, new thoughts I wanted to ponder, new things that resonated.  That is the mark of a good book I think!  The struggle we’ve been in the midst of now is different, but it is nonetheless, struggle.  ‘We not only can survive struggle but, it seems, we are meant to survive in new ways, with new insights, with new heart.’[2]  This book is one of those thin books, thick with meaning and with insight and application.  It is one that speaks to the struggles we find ourselves in, though we all face different ones, but that also points towards the hope that is offered to us in God, hope that allows us to be transformed rather than turned to dust.  It is one that does it without trying to sweep the struggle under the carpet, rushing us to a hope that feels inauthentic, but that allows us to look at our reality while drawing us into a reimagined future.  It is, in my mind at least, a thin book rich with prophetic utterings.

Joan, helpfully I think, places some of the marks of the struggles we go through, and that are evident in Jacob’s story, against the potential gifts that they can become.  For example, the struggle with fear is put beside the chapter on the gift of courage.  This stops the book from being one of doom and gloom, but rather recognises that ‘Struggle is a process of pitfalls and challenges which, if met, become hope.’[3]  The elements of struggle that she names are ‘change, isolation, darkness, fear, powerlessness, vulnerability, exhaustion, and scarring.’[4]  The gifts that these things might emerge to become she says are ‘conversion, independence, faith, courage, surrender, self-acceptance, endurance, purity of heart, and a kind of personal growth that takes us beyond pain to understanding.’[5]  These are all things that, I think, if we’re honest, are some of the markers of the struggles we go through in life, whether for just a short period or for more prolonged times.

I think sometimes, as Christians, we find it hard to acknowledge struggle.  Or feel guilt that if we do, then it must mean that in some ways our faith is deficient or our hope in God not strong enough.  Even if it’s not what we would say, or believe, for others, it is something we tell ourselves internally about our own lives.  I also think, sometimes, we try to just pretend struggle isn’t real or doesn’t grip us quite as much as it does.  It is hard to move through struggle to hope when the struggle and its impact is minimized.  So Joan’s attempt to create ‘a spirituality of struggle that owns the pain but also comes to grips with each of its dimensions, with all of its demands’ is valuable.[6]  As much as we don’t want to go through them, they do offer opportunity to become different if our eyes are open to what might be.  ‘The spirituality of struggle gives birth to the spirituality of hope.’[7]  Hope that is firmly grounded in God who never leaves us or lets us go, and who wrestles with us.

There is so much more that could be said about the book … but really I think the best thing is to go and read it for yourself.  Read it and find yourself in Jacob’s story.  Read it and reflect on your own story.  Read it and be reminded that ‘hope and despair are not opposites.’[8]  Rather, the difference is that ‘despair shapes an attitude of mind.  Hope creates a quality of soul.’[9]  I can almost certainly guarantee that this thin book will help spur your soul through despair to hope.

We always think of hope as grounded in the future.  That’s wrong, I think.  Hope is fulfilled in the future but it depends on our ability to remember that, like Jacob, we have survived everything in life to this point – and have emerged in even better form than we were when these troubles began.  So why not this latest situation, too?  Then we hope because we have no reason not to hope.[10]

I cannot recommend this thin book highly enough, especially in times like the ones we are in.  Even though struggles, like now, may scar us, may they also lead us to being transformed by hope.

 

[1] Chittister, Joan D., Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 2

[2] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 3

[3] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 19

[4] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 19

[5] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 19

[6] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 16

[7] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 97

[8] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 106

[9] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 106

[10] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 110

End Notes, and a Tale of James, Jim and Jimmy.

This is a case study in end notes, telling the story of two books, and three people called James at birth, but changing it later to Jim or Jimmy.

In 1975 James D G Dunn published a book that challenged the scholarly and popular discussions of charismatic experience and how such experiences of the Holy Spirit relates to Jesus and the wider teaching of the New Testament. The book was called Jesus and the Spirit. The subtitle was more explicit. A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience of Jesus and the First Christians as Reflected in the New Testament. This book came five years after The Baptism of the Holy Spirit, an equally rigorous study of the phenomenon of spiritual endowment and expression of spiritual gifts, and largely based on Dunn's doctoral thesis completed under Professor C F D Moule. 

My late friend and mentor, the quiet and gentlemanly James Taylor, minister of Stirling Baptist Church, had bought Dunn's new book and had paid £9 for it. The inflation calculator adjusts that to £77 in 2020. Jesus and the Spirit was an expensive book. Jim was both delighted and disappointed.

Jim Taylor was a scholar pastor, a deeply and widely read preacher, and one of the most influential and respected leaders to have graced our Scottish Baptist family. He was also a wise mentor and generous friend to me, until his death in 2011. One day Jim Taylor phoned for our regular post Sunday catch up, when we consoled or encouraged each other as required. In the conversation he told me he had noticed the publication of a big and expensive book I ought to have; it would arrive by post during the week, and it was already paid for. I still have that Analytical Concordance of the RSV New Testament, one of those special gifts intended to bring both pleasure and usefulness, and it has done both down the years. Every time I use that book "I thank my God on every remembrance" of Jim Taylor. 

But back to Jimmy Dunn's book. As pastor preacher in a church at a time when charismatic experience divided evangelical opinion, Jim Taylor was delighted to have an authoritative examination of the New Testament on the issue. Jesus and the Spirit offered balance and ballast in a discussion too frequently divisive and competitivein our Scottish context, with echoes of Corinthian spiritual one-upmanship on the one hand ,and the dangers of quenching the Spirit on the other. Dunn's book, with its predecessor Baptism in the Holy Spirit, was an exegetical game changer of the higher level discussions about contemporary charismatic experience, the biblical text, and early Christianity. As the years have passed, Christian theology and experience have moved on to new emphases and focal points of discussion, but Dunn's work persists as an enduring contribution to study of the interface of historical context, religious experience and textual interpretation.   

Jim Taylor's disappointment with Jesus and the Spirit was that in a book of 516 pages, 361 pages were main text, and 150 pages were end matter, made up of end notes, (362-456) Bibliography, (457-475) and three indices, (476- (Biblical refs, Modern Authors, Subjects). As we sat at the table after dinner, looking through Jim's shiny new book, we soon came to realise that J D G Dunn had set a new bar level for scholarly monographs and the role of end notes / footnotes.This was a gold mine, and it would reward in proportion to investment of time and study.

The book was published in the prestigious and handsomely produced SCM New Testament Library. As the years passed, Dunn's developing work settled into an established pattern of rigorous historical research, cogent argument, textual exegesis and theological discussion - supported by hundreds even thousands of end notes/footnotes. It would be another 15 years or so before word processing, Microsoft Word, and computer software technology changed forever the approach to writing and referencing. So compiling, checking and writing those end notes was a herculean task. In Jesus and the Spirit there were 1600 plus of them!

There's little doubt that end notes are less convenient to the reader. Intriguingly Dunn's volume is the only one in the NTL series that uses end notes, presumably because of the sheer volume in Dunn's book. But those who read the book, including Jim Taylor, came to appreciate the scholarly substructure provided by those packed pages of supplementary information, wider scholarly reference, adduced and evaluated evidence, and each one of them a footprint showing the path of the argument. 

Jimmy Dunn's book is a tour de force at several levels. It was, and remains, essential reading on New Testament pneumatology; one key reason for that is the endnotes, and the degree of industry and thoroughness they demonstrated. And in addition, Dunn made a real contribution to a debate that had divided contemporary evangelical Christianity, and did so with authority and fairness. Dunn's own background was in charismatic evangelical circles, evolving later into a more progressive position which has never entirely moved away from the evidential value of experiential Christianity excavated from biblical texts.

Browsing through my own copy, I am again reminded of Jim Taylor, and the gift of friendship he brought to many of us. My own understanding of the integration of reading, study, pastoral care, preaching and prayer, owes a great deal to early years in ministry, spending time with Jim. He personified something he admired in others, and spoke of such in John Stott and C E B Cranfield, "godliness and good learning."

Holding this book now, flicking through those tightly tied down end notes, I remember with some sadness, and much gladness, that evening when Jim Gordon and Jim Taylor discussed Jimmy Dunn over earl grey tea and Helen's home made shortbread! 

Thinking About How Life Has Changed for Good.

Walking for exercise is one of the few permitted activities during lock down. These past months the constraints on freedom and movement are felt as an assault on life itself, and it hurts.

I have always enjoyed walking. More than that, I have always needed to walk, going back to a childhood in the country three miles from public transport, when we couldn't afford a car.

But as I grew up, walking as necessity became something enjoyable, to be looked forward to. A Saturday walking for miles was our way of seeing the world, and finding our place in it.

The Scottish word is stravaigin, its meaning a combination of walking about for the sake of it, and that inner impulse to change where we are for somewhere else.

Moorland knee deep in heather, across green fields, around a loch, along the beach, up a hill or more than one; landscape, and what was to be found there, provides an outer world that heals, sustains and stimulates the inner world. 

It's when I'm walking that I become more self-aware by becoming more attentive to what is around me. Walking creates a rhythm in which the body slowly fits itself to the world around, while recovering a sense of who it is that inhabits our inner world.

From those early years endlessly and tirelessly walking the world from our door, to these later years of walking to stay healthy, the experience is the same; time to learn, to love, to pay attention and to make space for joy to barge in.

One of the lock down walks took us up a local hill ,towards an expanding horizon under a casually choreographed canopy of clouds, in a sky only the best artists would attempt. Walking opens up new horizons so that we can see further and more clearly, and sometimes it does the same with our inner horizons helping us interpret the landscape of emotion, imagination and longing.

On the way up the hill, we passed the local wood pigeon, balanced nonchalantly on a dried branch. How do birds know a branch will take their weight? That kilo class pigeon is perhaps more secure on its precarious perch than I am with both feet on the ground.

And amongst the grass, allowed to grow longer to be cut for winter feeding, the usual meadow flowers in a Scottish field. And this tiny beauty, only visible from close up, soaking up sunshine and probably rooted in the rich nourishment of last year's manure. The biblical reference is obvious; "look at the birds...consider the lilies."

These long weeks of lock down have been emotionally expensive, at times emotionally ruinous. Incessant updates and briefings about a global health crisis one everyone's doorstep; anxiety and fear at the shops, replacing what used to be called retail therapy; uncertainty and sadness at so much normality erased overnight; loneliness and frustration as our primary emotional supporters of family, friends and togetherness are made unavailable to us.

New horizons of hope, a more secure sense of place, encounters with unexpected beauty; these are ways of re-configuring our inner world by walking in the outer world. Life has changed for good - I know, the phrase is uncomfortably ambiguous. But for those of us later in life it's hard to see how we will ever get back to life as we have known it for so long. And yet. Hopefulness grows out of looking for goodness, beauty, and truth in a God-made and God-loved world. If life has changed for good, perhaps it is our calling now to realise good out of the way life has changed.  

The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris, A Writing Pilgrim

Martin Buber was one of the most significant writers, philosophers and religious thinkers of the Twentieth Century. His book I and Thou represented a paradigm shift in how humans view the world of objects and subjects. Relationships depend on the address and response of I and Thou, a dialogue between two subjects. That had great significance for Buber's understanding of prayer, worship and the relationship God establishes with each human being, I and Thou.

The poet Kathleen Norris was a careful reader of Buber, her own spiritual search a commitment to establishing and growing a relationship of dialogue and openness to the mysterious presence of God, who is never object, always subject. In The Cloister Walk, her best known book of spiritual reflections, she quotes words of Buber that are deeply resonant in her own experience of God.

"All of us have access to God, but each has a different access. Our great chance lies precisely in our unlikeness. God's all-inclusiveness manifests itself in the infinite multiplicity of the ways that lead to him, each of which is open to one person."

This is the kind of nugget that frequently glints on Norris's pages, and especially in The Cloister Walk and a similar later volume Amazing Grace. A Vocabulary of Faith. 

Norris is a lay oblate of the Benedictine Order, and her spirituality and Christian practice has been formed by the disciplines, liturgies and practices rooted in the Rule of St Benedict. When possible she participates in the rhythms of the liturgical day, but is also a preacher and active member within both Catholic and non Catholic churches. Much of her writing explores the tensions and structures of community, the inner conflicts of the individual, usually with reference to her own inner struggles with faith and doubt, and the challenge of sustaining relationships through the inevitable and at times disruptive changes in human lives. 

What I found both unusual and welcome was her shrewd frankness about her own heart, and her sharp observation of others' behaviour and character as evidence of what was going on in their hearts. She tells of the daily rhythms of prayer, Psalm singing or reading, meeting in community and learning to live with others. Doing so, we learn to love and come to like people, and to live into the diversity and frustrations inherent in community building. Such disciplined care is the making of those who would follow the One who gave the New Commandment, "Love one another as I have loved you."

As an example of what it means to love someone through thick and thin, Norris writes with considerable frankness about her marriage, her husband, and the tensions and conflicts that building a sustainable shared future involve. In The Cloister Walk she reflects bravely on the triumphs and struggles of intimacy, commitment, and mutual accompaniment in many of life's most serious challenges to two people determined to be with and for each other    

She is very good on depression. Her husband suffered great anguish and with great honesty she writes of how to build a marriage that can sustain the extremes of unbearable joy and unbearable pain. The answer is love, but that too is a great mystery, and lays on us burdens that are also all but unbearable. When she likens her husbands suffering to crucifixion, you know you are reading someone who gets it, and who understands something of the terror of an inner world shut down. In one line she pinpoints the pastoral challenge when helping people confront and live through their suffering: "There's a fine line between idealising or idolising pain, and confronting it with hope." Read that again, slowly.

The Cloister Walk isn't a narrative that reaches a conclusion. It is loosely based on the liturgical year but the cycle is interrupted by essays on saints, reflections on sin, sins and grace, memoirs of incidents, people and life turning points, and much more. There are chunks of lectio divina, prayerful rumination on Bible texts, and out of these come characteristic pointers to how life can be better, obedience more faithful, insight less obscured by our standing in our own light. 

Her brief essay on Gregory of Nyssa ends with the poignant confession: "I frequently take consolation in Gregory's sense that with God there is always more unfolding, than what we can glimpse of the divine is always exactly enough, and never enough."   

    

 

Kathleen Norris: "Learning to read the world better, that we may better know our place in it."

During my read everything about Benedictine spirituality phase, I came across the poet and spiritual writer Kathleen Norris. Strangely I have never got round to looking for and reading all that much of her poetry, though some of her prose writing tips over into the use of poetic language if not structure. But what intrigued and held my interest was her honesty and curiosity about what it is like to pray, to live life in a Godward direction, to seek with the hope of finding and to knock with 'I'm not going away' persistence. 

The first non fiction book she wrote was Dakota. It was reviewed in Commonweal with enthusiasm, “a poet’s book; a work of beauty; a testament to the work of the Spirit.” The original printing of 8,000 proved to be an underestimate - it sold over 100,000 in hardback, and since has gone on selling. The sub title A Spiritual Geography, opens up a book about open spaces and extended silences, a lovingly critical mapping of landscape that sees beneath the visible and senses the depths of life around her. But please note; Norris not only sees beneath the visible, she also sees, pays attention to, and contemplates the meaning of what is visible, tangible and thus made sacramental by the invisible currents of grace. 

She had moved from the cornucopia of New York, to the isolated prairie town of Lemmon, population around 1700. She writes about the desert and the flash floods, the semi-permanent blue blue sky, the foibles and habits of the people, their courage and indomitable rootedness in where they were, and the weather - cyclones and drought, baking temperatures and desert frost, rocks and withered plains, vast cloud formations before rain and hot breezes that dehydrate in minutes.

And in all of this the contemplative voice of poet observing the given external landscape, and the given inner landscape of her mind and heart, he thoughts and feelings, her spiritual responsiveness to what is, and what might be. Think of this book as a travel book; except there are two journeys. The one takes you over the topography and demography of Dakota, its land and people; the other takes you on a journey inwards, reflective, alert and an education of the spirit.

Thinking about the grasslands and the long formation of compost, she considers what's happening to her inner landscape, climate and growth:

"It astonishes me as much as it delights me that moving to the Dakota grasslands led me to a religious frontier where the new growth where the new growth is fed by something old, the 1,500 year tradition of Benedictine monasticism. It grounds me; I use it as compost to 'work the earth of my heart'...I can long for change for a 'new earth...a good heart, a heart like the earth, which drinks up the rain that falls on it and yields a rich harvest.'"

My first reading of this book was 25 years ago. Slipped inside the back cover is the sheet of paper on which I wrote a subject index of pages where Norris hit nails on the head and drove important insights into my head. The list now reads as intriguing clues to what interested me then. Such notes as, tensions in life inevitable but good; dryness and impoverished spirit; the sacrament of work; laughter as benediction; poetry and faith; not blaming yourself is pride.

Now that last one; that not blaming ourselves is a form of pride, our loud disclaimer as if we never would or could have done whatever. The old Scottish cry of the self-exculpating child, "It wisnae me!" Norris is on to something here. Honest admission of responsibility, or at least refusing the instinct to self-excuse takes the kind of humility that only comes with maturity, and a growing self-awareness, and acceptance of our own fallibility. Such open acknowledgement of fault runs counter to so much self justifying and self-excusing that has become part of political, social and cultural life. To that extent it is a regression to childish evasion of the reality of who we really are.

In a sermon, one Sunday, Norris quoted the wonderfully named Dorotheus of Gaza, "The root of all disturbance, if one will go to its source, is that no one will blame himself." Norris goes on, "When I read those words at Hope Church, one old farmer forgot himself; he nodded and shouted out, 'That's right.'  

Dakota is an unusual book, and unusually rich in sharp and humane observation, leaving the impression of a writer who has patience with human behaviour and oddities, such that her willingness to take time to understand rather than criticise, easily tumbles over into compassion for people, all people.

That is the essence of hospitality. Here's how she puts it:

"The classic sign of our acceptance of God's mystery is welcoming and making room for the stranger, the other, the surprising, the unlooked for and unwanted. It means learning to read the world better, that we may better know our place in it."

Who wouldn't want to pin that one down, and come back to it 25 years later, and find it truer than ever?