Living Wittily

Bonhoeffer: "One should keep on, ever more undaunted and joyfully, becoming a theologian..."

"As a student of theology, no one can and should do otherwise than keep enquiring after the true gospel, even more attentively and objectively, in ever more truth and love."

Bonhoeffer was saying farewell to the theological students in Berlin when he wrote this, prior to going to London to pastor two German churches. This short address is a passionate defence of theology and theologians as a calling essential to the life and future of the Church.

There was theological error, ecclesial compromise, a contamination of motive and a failure of vocational faithfulness in the German Church as it aligned its fortunes and future with the Nazi vision. Bonhoeffer was very clear that in the face of such false theology, theological faithfulness would require outspoken witness, and the cost and sacrifice of a true discipleship.

He urged theological students to go on doing good theology, enquiring after the true gospel. The theologian is not called to ecclesial politics and tactics. "The student of theology is the last one who should be thinking tactically and instead should carry on working with purely theological objectivity, in service to God." The theologian is called neither to loud protesting arguments nor clever tactical manoeuvres in church and state. "One should in such times, err on the side of being too quiet rather than too loud. Fore the false confidence of a loud voice has nothing to do with the assurance of repentance and the gospel."

Bonhoeffer himself would go against his own advice later when he became embroiled in precisely the machinations of a church in extremis, seeking to minimise the harm being done by his country's war machine in blind devotion to an ideology of death.

"Finally, one should know as a true theologian that, even where our knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ in its truth and purity keep us away from false doctrines, we stand beside our brethren who have wandered and been misled, sharing their guilt, interceding and praying for them., knowing that our own life depends, not on our better knowledge of being on the right side, but on forgiveness."

This is a call to radical discipleship, a blend of peace-making, truth telling, and gospel humility, each an essential in a true theologian. Those commitments of the theologian were carried forward and given firm biblical anchorage in his later writings, especially Life Together and Discipleship.

For now I read this short address and am astonished yet again at the prescience and theological instincts of Bonhoeffer. This was spoken to students when he was 27 years old, his country descending towards immense darkness, the church divided and confused and tempted by the idols of State prestige and power, his best efforts in the Church Struggle seeming ineffective; but he recognised that the gospel would require minds committed to truth, vocations faithful in their focus on the gospel and the health of the church, and for that the church needed theologians with a passion for Jesus Christ. 

"Theological students must learn and know that the driving force in their lives and thinking, as theologians, can only come from the passion of Jesus Christ, our crucified Lord. The study of theology cannot be conquered by the overflowing vitality of one's own passions; rather the real study of theologia sacra begins when in the midst of questioning and seeking human beings encounter the cross; when they recognize the endpoint of all their passions in the suffering of God at the hands of humankind and realize that their entire vitality stands under judgment."

This is about first loyalties in Christian discipleship for theologians. Truth and Love, and both as revealed in Jesus Christ and his gospel. The encounter with the cross is not a single moment, but a whole life commitment, an alignment of life purpose and theological vocation with "the suffering of God at the hands of humankind." Theological education is not neutral, but arises out of a commitment to truth and love as revealed in the gospel. And it may be costly and demanding, but it is in the service of a God whose suffering on the cross bears witness to the love and truth of God as eternal realities that have intersected with the world at its worst as redeeming and reconciling grace.

So Bonhoeffer concludes, "One should keep on, ever more undaunted and joyfully, becoming a theologian, speaking the truth in love." (Eph. 4.15)

All quotations are from 'What Should a Student of Theology So Today?", Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works (English Edition), London 1933-35. Vol. 12:432-435.

A Thought for Each Day This Week: To Know the Love that Surpasses Knowledge.

Monday 30 January

Ephesians 3.7 &14, 15 “I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace given me through the working of his power…For this reason I kneel before the Father from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.”

“For this reason I kneel…” What reason? Paul’s answer is the reason we all kneel before the Father – “the gift of God’s grace given us through the working of God’s power.” It’s a hard time to be a Christian in a world so broken. Yet by prayer and God’s grace we can have the same wide, generous, open-armed compassion for the world that brought Paul to his knees in prayer for the whole family of God, that is, every soul made in God’s image. By intercession we make ourselves conduits, sluices, through which God’s grace flows.

Tuesday 31 January

Ephesians 3.I6 “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being…”

When the problems of the world, and the worries of our own lives, and the anxiety felt by whole communities of our country – when these and much more drain us of energy, joy and hope, think of what Paul prayed for, and hear him praying it for you. Then make it your own prayer, now, here: Lord strengthen me with power through your Spirit in my inner being…”

Wednesday 01 February

Ephesians 3.17 “So that Christ may dwell in your heart through faith.”

By faith in Christ we are made one with the Saviour, drawn into the very life of God. Christ dwells in our hearts, the risen life of Christ is within us and strengthens us in our inner being. But more than that, Christ is in us and we are in Him, so that “our lives are hidden with Christ in God.” (Col 3.3) Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

Thursday 02 February

Ephesians 3.17-18 “And I pray that you being rooted and established in love may have power together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep  is the love of Christ.”

Rooted is about being a tree with strong anchorage and full nourishment from deep roots. Established is about foundations, straight, true, sound, solid, and our foundation is the love of Christ. You can’t ever fully grasp the depth dimensions of God’s love in Christ; as well stand beneath Niagara with a bucket, or a thimble! Just stand under the deluge!

Friday 03 February

Ephesians 3.19 “And to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

To know what surpasses your knowledge, to understand the incomprehensible – that can only happen if God expands the horizons of our hearts and draws us ever more deeply into the mystery that Charles Wesley puzzled over and admitted defeat. “In vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of love divine.” We’ll never understand until we are in heaven. Till then we wonder, and worship at the one who “emptied Himself of all but love, and bled for Adam’s helpless race.” Amazing Love!

Saturday 04 February

Ephesians 3. 20 “Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…”

I don’t know about you but I can ask a lot, and I have quite a lively imagination. But they are not enough to outdo the One who is able to do immeasurably more than anything I can think of. We aren’t asked to be followers of Jesus in our own strength. Yes, at times it’s hard going, and we pray for strength, faith, help with hard decisions, and help for those we love – Remember, “He can do immeasurable more, and his power is at work within us.” We’re not on our own. We are in Christ, and He is in us, and as our Risen Lord it is his power that’s at work within us, renewing and reviving.

Sunday 05 February

Ephesians 3.21 “To Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever.”

This whole passage is like an illuminated manuscript that places the love of God in Christ against a shining gold foil background. And that dazzling gold highlights who God is towards us; Love. Love beyond our grasp but within our reach. Love that the baffles the mind, but which the heart recognises. Love deeper than any needs we could ever have. Love beyond our imagination, but nearer than our own hearts.

So we make Paul’s prayer our own: May Christ dwell in our hearts through faith, and may we be rooted and established in love, filled to the measure of the fullness of God.

Wave Watching on the Beach at Banff (Scotland)

Wave watching today - and wave listening. There are few sights and sounds I enjoy being near, more than just this side of wet shoes on the beach. This was at Banff earlier.

 

Whimsical Haiku

There is a moment

when rolling becomes tumbling -

then the beach beckons.

 

Before it crashes

the wave holds a dancers poise

then dives for sheer joy.

 

Forty shades of blue

on a palette that stretches

to far horizons.

 

 

 

 

 

"All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full." (Ecclesiastes 1.7)

At the far end of the beach at Banff, in Scotland, a small river finally reaches its destination. I walked here today and stood for a while enjoying the mid-afternoon light, the blue skies, the sound of waves as the tide turned, and the almost inaudible murmuring of the river as it emerged from the grass and met the cobbled slope, where it rushed towards the sea.

It's a favourite beach, but this part of the walk is less familiar. "All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they will return." (Ecclesiastes 1.7) I've often pondered these words, in the way you do when well written words don't immediately give up all of their meaning. Like many other sentences in Ecclesiastes, there are hidden depths in this image, suggesting constant motion, journey's culmination, and the cycle of rain, river and sea.

I stood for a few minutes gazing and listening, half thinking and half praying, the scene so obviously recollecting words that are meant to induce pondering and wondering. I knew why I had paused. The words of Ecclesiastes are an exact fit to the lovely serenity in front of me. It might be worth explaining why they came back to me so powerfully.  

The first sentence of Eccl. 1.7 was used by Elie Wiesel as the titles of his two volume autobiography, in my view one of the most important literary accounts of the Holocaust. Volume One of his memoir he titled All Rivers Run to the Sea, and Volume Two, And the Sea is Never Full. Wiesel survived Auschwitz and for the rest of his life he determined to tell the stories of those who perished there, and to bear witness through these stories and his own story to the truth, the reality, the factual inescapability of the Shoah.

As a Nobel Prize winning novelist, an essayist and journalist, Wiesel like Jeremiah the prophet, wrote to inform, to declare, to bear witness, to ensure that the truth would never be silenced, or forgotten, or denied. Two days ago in our different ways we marked Holocaust Memorial Day and yesterday I was reading about Elie Wiesel. And while standing by that lovely stream flowing out of the marsh into the sea, the words of Qoheleth came naturally to mind, towing with them memories of reading Wiesel's autobiography.

It was 1997. I was on holiday in Yorkshire National Park, near Goathland, in a lovely 19th C railway cottage beside the railway where every day a steam train passed. I was sitting under a tree, in a deck chair, beside the stream at the bottom of the garden, reading All Rivers Run to the Sea. The story had just reached the point where the chugging of the steam trains arriving at Auschwitz, and the screaming of the whistles, signalled arrival, with all the horror and terror that lay ahead.

And at that precise moment, in that eerie way that defies our most insistent common-sense, the Yorkshire steam train came under the bridge with a huge puff of white smoke and a loud whistle. I'm not sure I have ever fully recovered from that near numinous sense of fear and heightened awareness, as the world of 50 years earlier coincided with my immediate mental images of the book I was reading. What I do know is this; I can't read (or recall) that verse of the Bible without remembering that Tuesday afternoon, in July 1997, sitting beside a stream, reading under a tree, when Elie Wiesel's testimony was accompanied by sound effects choreographed by I'm not sure what - or whom. 

"All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full." The writer of Ecclesiastes was too good a philosopher-preacher to indulge in frivolity for its own sake. And Elie Wiesel was too serious in his calling as survivor, storyteller and witness, and too burdened by memory of what happened to his people, to choose his book titles carelessly.

He doesn't explain his choice. As one who stood in that liminal space reserved for those whose life experiences make faith in God at times all but impossible, he stood in defiant trust; and as one for whom at other times faith was at least real enough to have an argument with a God in whose world Auschwitz happened, he stood his ground before God, albeit with his shoes off. 

For myself, I defer to a man whose humanity, was so deeply wounded and permanently formed by unimaginable suffering, both witnessed and experienced. Today's lovely walk, in a world beautiful and far removed from all the brokenness elsewhere, I was ambushed by a scene of a river and the sea, and by a memory of a book I once read, under a tree, beside a stream, alongside a railway.

"All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they will return."         

"the grace that for so long has kept this world": The Wisdom of Wendell Berry,

I've always considered Wendell Berry a prophet, in both senses of the word. Like a number of other writers, throughout a long life he has expressed a foreboding of, and argued resistance to human ingenuity, especially in the sciences of exploitation, technological cleverness, ruthless growth economics, and the impact of all of these on a planet that is finite, fragile and requiring care.

 

Except the care that the planet now requires is emergency treatment, its wounds deep and increasingly resistant to healing, its health compromised to the point of requiring oxygen. Rachel Carson warned us about The Silent Spring. E F Schumacher tried to convince us Small is Beautiful. In No Logo, Naomi Klein alerted us to the banal and baleful power of the logo, the consumer dreams and the resulting economic and ecological nightmare - her more recent book This Changes Everything. Climate vs Capitalism, polarises the issues, but does so because current trajectories suggest we are entering a zero-sum game with climate, ecology and the future of humanity and our planetary home at stake. 

 

Wendell Berry foresaw and foretold much of this, in essays, poems, novels, lectures  and any other medium that allowed him to communicate the deep concerns of a man in love with the world, and witnessing its suffering. He is a prophet in the second sense too.

 

His own agrarian practices, his getting his hands dirty approach to the land and its birds and animals, domestic and wild, his awareness of the crucial role of trees, forests and rivers - all of these are major themes in his writing, and primary values of his way of life. He tries to tell it as it is. His critique is not mere condemnation but persuasion to change. 

 

It's with an amazed sadness that we are reading below, 35 years after it was written, a poem that speaks with mature precision to our current 2023 condition. Our self-destructive drives, our rapacious milking of the earth for all its worth, the long, slow and inexorable strangling of the world's breathing systems - it's madness. In our greed to live as we please, we plot our own death.

 

Berry is a careful poet, and a gentle man. He doesn't use exaggeration for rhetorical effect. When he uses a word like 'wantonly', he means it, and as exactly as its dictionary definition. Such definitions as "unprovoked and gratuitous malice", "unrestrained excess"; these are exactly and precisely what he means about human activity devoted to profit, growth, wealth, resource exploitation and all the other terminologies of markets, money and "growing an economy" on a global scale, and to hell with the consequences.

 

"1988 Sabbath Poem II." 

 

It is the destruction of the world

In our own lives that drives us

Half insane, and more than half.

To destroy that which we were given

In trust: how will we bear it?

It is our own bodies that we give

To be broken, our bodies

Existing before and after us

In clod and cloud, worm and tree,

That we, driving or driv'n, despise

In our greed to live, our haste

To die. To have lost, wantonly,

The ancient forest, the vast grasslands

Is our madness, the presence

In our very bodies of our grief.

(Wendell Berry)

 

The prophet Wendell Berry is no friend of religion in its more conservative Christian guises. One of his earliest and now a classic essay, 'A Native Hill', he explains why; and he has American Evangelical individualism clearly in his sights. 

 

“I am uneasy with the term,” he writes, “for such religion as has been openly practiced in this part of the world has promoted and fed upon a destructive schism between body and soul, Heaven and earth... And so people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere - to a pursuit of 'salvation' that was really only another form of gluttony and self-love, the desire to perpetuate their lives beyond the life of the world. The Heaven-bent have abused the earth thoughtlessly, by inattention, and their negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately. Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions.”

 

God as a power weapon, theology as justification for the violation of nature. And all this under the guise of a doctrine that reads Genesis as a seven day creation, and an interpretation of "rule the earth and subdue it" as a licence for human rule as domination and exploitation rather than stewardship and conservation. Such a destructive mindset, underpinned by religious zeal and a belief in the nation as exceptional, and chosen as blessed, is for Berry the aviation fuel that jet propels the lust to possess, unlimited extraction, mass production, ruthless pursuit of profit, wealth creation, and mega-industries in whose eyes the planet is both raw material up for grabs and 24/7 factory.  

 

But Berry has never given up hope, never surrendered to the plundering of the world as either inevitable or invincible. Deeply resistant to self-concerned piety and material greed as the two primary drivers corporate business endeavour, he is still familiar with the mystery of grace, the gift that is life, and the precious trust the Creator has placed in humans to "not to destroy that which we were given in trust."

 

So I finish with an extract from another of his poems, in which grace is both gift and demand, a covenant mutual obligation between humanity, nature and God. This is the true human vocation - "we must be stirring to keep this gift dwelling among us, eternally alive in time."

 

"Sabbath Poem 2005 XVII."   

...In the lengthening shadow he has climbed

again to the ridgetop and across

to the westward slope to see the ripe

light of autumn in the turning trees,

the twilight he must go by now

that only grace can give. Thus far

he keeps the old sectarian piety:

By grace we live. But he can go

no further. Having known the grace

that for so long has kept this world,

haggard as it is, as we have made it,

we cannot rest, we must be stirring

to keep this gift dwelling among us,

eternally alive in time. This

is the great work, no other, none harder,

none nearer rest, or more beautiful.

 

Jonah and the Whale 8 Women Commentators

There's been a recent resurgence of scholarly publications on Jonah. What I find intriguing and heartening is the growing number of such publications by women biblical scholars.

One of the first major contributions on Jonah was Phyllis Trible, whose Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method and the Book of Jonah was published in 1995. This dual purpose work was and remains a substantial contribution to rhetorical criticism as a key hermeneutical approach to the biblical text. Literary critical, and rhetorical analysis, open new avenues to understanding the author's care and craft in composition, and how such skill becomes a vehicle for the art of persuasion. Jonah is then used by Trible as an example to test drive many of her proposals. As the publishers explained to prospective readers:

"In this book Trible's formulated guidelines are applied to a detailed study of the book of Jonah. A close reading with respect to structure, syntax, style, and substance elicits a host of meanings embedded in the text, enabling the relationship between artistry and theology to emerge with clarity."

The result is an enlightening and innovative approach to Jonah that is multi-disciplinary, and avoids a far too swift foreclosing on the text with settled conclusions as to what it means, and what the writer is trying to persuade the reader to think, or do. 

A couple of years later Trible followed up with a commentary on Jonah for the New Interpreter's Bible. Like several first class commentaries in this series, it is embedded in a composite volume that contains the full Book of the Twelve Prophets and Daniel, which makes it expensive and hard to source. That seriously limits the audience for her commentary - and that's a shame, because Trible on Jonah is one of the most stimulating treatments available. Find it in a library if you can. 

A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives. The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture, (Cambridge 2000), by Yvonne Sherwood, is a tour de force, a definitive example of listening to a text by listening to how others have heard it. The result is a book packed with information about how Jonah has been represented in painting, sculpture, stained glass, novels, poetry, film, music, slave songs, sermons and so many other human cultural and linguistic ways of telling the story, and sadly, not always telling it well.

Sherwood illumines several major issues, including anti-Judaism in biblical studies (itself now a major field of both study and required redress), and the secularisation of the Bible whose stories are now popularly divorced from the numinous and transcendent as understood in the Bible itself. This book is hard to describe adequately as to its range and importance; it is required reading for any and all serious study of Jonah that post dates its publication. It's that good.

By far the most substantial commentary on Jonah so far is now Amy Erickson's magnum opus, the Illuminations Commentary on Jonah, published by Eerdmans in 2021. This is a major critical commentary but written to be read as well as consulted. This series of commentaries has two main sections for each volume, giving them a particular niche as exegetical resources.

Part One is 'A History of Consequences', and this accounts for around 170 pages. Not unlike Sherwood, Erickson has carefully excavated the history of interpretation but used that information to examine the consequences, impact and after effects of certain interpretations. Like Sherwood, Erickson unearths surprising, at times shocking ways the text of Jonah has been preached, received, interpreted and shaped (at times misshaped), cultural norms and theological conclusions, for good or ill.

Part Two is the Interpretation section, of around 200 pages. This is in the more traditional form of a commentary. I intend to write a full review of this commentary later - for now, with Trible, Sherwood and Erickson, Jonah scholars are well set up for future studies. Of which there are even more in the pipeline, and also by leading women scholars!

A third major study of reception history, or history of interpretation has just been published by Blackwell, Jonah Through the Centuries, by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. The approach is different in this series, however. The commentary works through the text verse by verse, and brings the history of interpretation to bear on the meaning of each passage. This is done chronologically through early Jewish and Rabbinic, to Christian Fathers, Medieval and Reformation periods, Enlightenment and into the contemporary era. Film and art, fiction and poetry, music and theatre are quoted alongside sermons, commentary and other literary studies.

This is the most user friendly format of the three volumes that major on the after-life of the story of Jonah; and Tiemeyer knows the field as thoroughly as Sherwood and Erickson. The format of this series is much more accessible for those who will be teaching and preaching the Jonah text. But Sherwood and Erickson add so much more, so that for those specially interested in reception history and history of consequences, all three are required reading.

April will see the publication of yet another premier league commentary, this time in the Hermeneia Series, by Susan Niditch, a veteran scholar of the Hebrew Bible.

I think the publishers description gives an indication of the approach and value of this commentary which brings yet another perspective on the puzzles of Jonah:

"Jonah's story is treated as a complex reflection upon the heavy matters of life and death, good and evil, and human and divine relations. The narrative probes an individual's relationship with a demanding deity, considers vexing cultural issues of "us versus them," and examines the role of Israel's God in a universal and international context. The author examines the ways in which Jonah prods readers to contemplate these fundamental issues concerning group- and self-definition."

And to complete the set, Elaine Philips has just published a composite volume in yet another series, this time on Obadiah, Jonah and Micah. This is a more conservative series than those reviewed above, but it is conservative scholarship at its best. Evidenced argument, consideration of alternative viewpoints, careful exegetical study in conversation with critical scholarship, and in most of the volumes I have used, readable commentary that seeks to understand original meaning and contemporary interpretation for the church.

The publisher's description is understandably positive, but Phillips' previous work suggests this is a worthwhile option for plunging with Jonah into the depths of what God is about. 

"Comprehensive and compelling, Elaine Phillips' commentary on Obadiah, Jonah and Micah is a thorough study that will give you an appreciation of the struggles these prophets faced as they answered God's call to speak into difficult geo-political contexts, and the lessons that they can teach Christians today."

The Prophets, A J Heschel.

I've spent a while in good company today. This is one of very few of my books that I think irreplaceable.

It's a First Edition, bought in Kiefer's Book Store in Chicago, in 1962. The front edges are untrimmed, and the binding and boards, the paper and fonts result in a book it's a delight to handle and read.

 

It also happens to be the magnum opus of my favourite Jewish writer, exploring the experience of the Hebrew Prophets in a book alight with passion, many passages reading like prose poems, freighted with immense learning and profound sympathy for his subject - Jewish prophetic faith as a conduit of Divine pathos, faithfulness and mercy.

 

I love this book as an object, for its subject, and for the mind and soul of its author.

R S Thomas: Mysticism and Meeting God on the Moor

We all meet God in our own way. There are moments of recognition that, brief as they are, touch those deepest longings we find it hard to name. In the encounter with God it is seldom clear whether we meet God, or God meets us, and in any case, to make such a distinction risks missing the mystery that challenges all such certainties.

Years ago, I sat at coffee with a man who was recovering from a stroke. He was as unmystical as anyone I ever met. Down to earth, a man of good humoured shrewdness, lived for his family and worked hard all his life to make things happen for them, his own unapologetic self-description, a working man.  He spoke of his time as a telephone engineer in Orkney, laying cables across the moorland. One day, unbidden, unexpected and unexplained, he was aware of the presence of God. And he knew. He knew he was known, and by Whom. His life, he said, was never the same after that. He remembered the cold wind, the cry of curlews, the unthreatening loneliness, and most of all - the space.

We talked a while about God, moorland, the cry of moorland birds, and the way such emptiness can suddenly be filled with presence. We agreed that the cry of the curlew is one of the most beautiful sounds in Scotland, a combination of longing and the cry of the heart that opens us up to the incredible, sometimes the ineffable.

At such moments of opening, I believe in the democratisation of mysticism, and the need to stop categorising and defining what in the end is the interruption of our lives by the God who invests those rare moments with transcendent significance. So in  one sense, my friend was unmystical - in another sense this most practical of men was alert to the invasion of gift, responsive to the call of God, and spoke only in quiet humility of what had happened to him. God had happened to him - and it is the sharing of such spiritual reality that is one of the most persuasive encouragements for the rest of us. We too have had our moments.  

The Moor

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.
 
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

Years ago, I sat at coffee with a man who was recovering from a stroke. He was as unmystical as anyone I ever met. Down to earth, a man of good humoured shrewdness, lived for his family and worked hard all his life to make things happen for them, his own unapologetic self-description, a working man.  He spoke of his time as a telephone engineer in Orkney, laying cables across the moorland. One day, unbidden, unexpected and unexplained, he was aware of the presence of God. And he knew. He knew he was known, and by Whom. His life, he said, was never the same after that. He remembered the cold wind, the cry of curlews, the unthreatening loneliness, and most of all - the space.

We talked a while about God, moorland, the cry of moorland birds, and the way such emptiness can suddenly be filled with presence. We agreed that the cry of the curlew is one of the most beautiful sounds in Scotland, a combination of longing and the cry of the heart that opens us up to the incredible, sometimes the ineffable.

At such moments of opening, I believe in the democratisation of mysticism, and the need to stop categorising and defining what in the end is the interruption of our lives by the God who invests those rare moments with transcendent significance. So in  one sense, my friend was unmystical - in another sense this most practical of men was alert to the invasion of gift, responsive to the call of God, and spoke only in quiet humility of what had happened to him. God had happened to him - and it is the sharing of such spiritual reality that is one of the most persuasive encouragements for the rest of us. We too have had our moments.  

The Moor

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.
 
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

Why I read Rowan Williams.

Why I read Rowan Williams.

He is brilliant, sometimes obscure, often a hard read, but always worth the effort. I share the view of Neil Dickson, "He’s a difficult read at times but you always feel even the crumbs from his table are worth devouring."

 

He is a living example of a true theologian, "a true theologian is one who prays, and one who prays in Spirit and in truth is a true theologian." (Evagrius Ponticus)

 

I read The Truce of God in the mid 1980's and discovered a Christian thinker for whom peace, nuclear disarmament, and facing up to the dangerous fantasies of power, is a theological task as well as a moral priority for followers of Jesus.

 

He is ridiculously clever and keeping up with him is a form of mental and spiritual aerobics. Good for you, but not to be overdone.

 

To use an older Scottish saying, "he is far ben with God", meaning he is one who knows God deeply and with that mixture of familiarity and distance, love and reverence that not only allows for mystery, but knows that on holy ground you take off your shoes. .

 

What he writes can stand re-reading and with recurring reward.

 

In the light of all of that, I'm reading two or three pages a day of this book - all the above qualities and qualifications are on show.

John le Carré's Final Novel: "Crisp Prose and a Precision-Tooled Plot."

Vintage John le Carré in his last book. A Christmas gift, a story well told, - a good read, if you like John le Carré, who I think is an acquired taste.

It's quite a short novel, but the plot is intricately woven, written with a gentle humour that teases the reader, and slowly reveals the lives and motivations of the characters. The plot is only gradually disentangled, as we come to know, begin to like, or start to suspect, the various characters whose story this is.

Readers of Le Carré will recognise his precise examination and exploration of secrets, subterfuge, betrayal, hidden loyalties and other nefarious human failings that are the working tools of espionage, and the shadowy worlds inhabited by those for whom mistrust is a way of life. I found the conclusion deeply satisfying, entirely plausible, and a more hopeful view of human emotion, motivation and what the existentialists would call authentic commitments.

The Observer review describes it as "crisp prose, a precision-tooled plot." Exactly so.