Living Wittily

Holy Week, Easter Sunday: "Here might I stay and sing: no story so divine..."

Here might I stay and sing:
  no story so divine;
never was love, dear King,
  never was grief like Thine!
    This is my Friend,
      in Whose sweet praise
      I all my days
    could gladly spend.

Never is a long time. Never before, and never again, can there be grief and love like that of Jesus on the Cross. The song of Love unknown, the Saviour’s love to me, tells of a love blazing with such holy mystery, that a lifetime of praise is only the beginning of a song that will find full orchestration in the music of Eternity.

Today is the day of resurrection, and in this last verse rather than “stay and sing” at the tomb, we are sent into the world to gladly spend all our days in the praise and worship and telling of our dear King, our Friend, Jesus. Holy Week is the story of our lives, the call to take up our own cross and follow the Risen One who goes before us. No story is so divine – “love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be. 

Prayer: Lord, call us once again, and strengthen us to take up the cross. Give us grace to follow you today, and entrust to you all our tomorrows. Saviour, go before us to show the way, and walk beside us as our Friend, Amen.

Holy Week: Saturday: "In life no house, no home my Lord on earth might have..."

In life no house, no home
  my Lord on earth might have;
in death no friendly tomb
  but what a stranger gave.
    What may I say?
      Heav'n was his home;
      but mine the tomb
    wherein he lay.

On Holy Saturday Jesus lay in someone else’s tomb. God in Christ is homeless, lifeless, the lips of the Word sealed in silence. But the finality of death is not the final word. “We see Jesus…crowned with glory and honour, that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man.”

Those last three lines are like the three first pencil lines of light heralding dawn, the new day, a world made new. But not yet. That question of the baffled, speechless heart is the ultimate rhetorical question – “What may I say?” Nothing. “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my life, my soul, my all.”

Prayer: Lord, it is “hard for our words to stretch to the measure of eternal things without breaking beneath us.” As well stand under Niagara with a bucket, as try to capture in words the meaning and mystery of your love for all you have made, including me. Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift. Amen

The image is William Blake's pencil sketch of the Trinity. I have always found this to be a deeply moving depiction of divine love, both intimate and cruciform.

Holy Week: Good Friday: "They rise, and needs will have my dear Lord made away..."

They rise, and needs will have
  My dear Lord made away;
A murderer they save,
  The Prince of Life they slay.
    Yet cheerful He
      To suffering goes,
      That He His foes
    From thence might free.

The whole hymn grates with irony. They save a murderer, and take the life of the Prince of Life. The word ‘cheerful’ seems so out of place when describing how someone undergoes suffering, and not for his friends but for his foes.

Holy Week is about an upside down world, where nothing is as we think it should be. Hosanna becomes Crucify, and in a holy mystery lovelessness becomes loved, then lovely. How that happens, only God knows!

Prayer: Lord, we do not ask to understand a love that willingly suffers for the sin of humanity. Enough that your love should be known by us, and made known to others, in all its incomprehensible mercy and grace. Amen.

The image is a tapestry I designed as a gift to a friend more than 10 years ago. It is based on the an cient image of the Lamb of God who conquers through the sacrifice of love.

"Behold the Lamb of God, who carries away the sin of the world...the Lamb in the midst of the throne..." 

Helicopters and Libraries.

 

Helicopters and Libraries, both of them ways of changing perspective, seeing further, raising vision above the routine.

 

I spent a while inside one today, a library that is. The Duncan Rice Library on the University of Aberdeen Campus.

 

I have a notebook where the day's takings are entered and added up into the credit column marked "stuff I didn't know that I now know."

 

Lifelong learning is letting our minds rise above the familiar, the known and the safe, and taking the risk of new ideas and different ways of seeing things.

 

Or so it seems to me

Holy Week, Thursday: "Why, what hath my Lord done?"

Why, what hath my Lord done?
  What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
  He gave the blind their sight.
    Sweet injuries!
      Yet they at these
      Themselves displease,
    And 'gainst him rise.

The rage and spite are inexplicable. Far from causing injury, the Lord brings healing. But compassion, welcome, kindness, and indiscriminate goodness are a threat, and unconditioned love is a strange, subversive presence for the status quo. The crowd, and the powers of Rome and Jerusalem do what power does when seriously threatened – eliminate the threat using lethal force.

To call goodness evil, and see in ubiquitous kindness a social threat, betrays the deep-seated toxins of societies which find ways to justify lovelessness. To people and cultures like them then, and us now, the Crucified Saviour came to transform, lovelessness to redeemed loveliness. 

Prayer: Lord we live in a world rediscovering the menace of rage and spite. By your Spirit, may your love unknown be made known, spreading abroad in our hearts, and overflowing in peace, hope and love across our fractured and fractious world. Amen.

Photo of a corner of the study, with the XII Station of the Cross, a studio model by Alexander Stoddart, a personal gift from the sculptor. It seemed the right place alongside Barth's massive work on the doctrine of reconciliation.

Holy Week, Wednesday: "Sometimes they strew his way..."

Sometimes they strew His way,
  And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the day
   Hosannas to their King.
    Then 'Crucify!'
      Is all their breath,
      And for His death
    They thirst and cry.

In such a short time, ‘Hosanna’ translated to ‘Crucify’. In the volatile alchemy of crowd excitement, praise and celebration turn to rejection and menace. Voices breathless with laughter and shouted gladness, are now breathlessly shouting for violent death. The crowds thirst and cry; later it will be the One who came from ‘his blest throne’ who will thirst, and cry.  They won’t save him, and he won’t save himself.

Prayer: Lord, forgive us when our Hosannas ring hollow, our praise is muted, and our hearts angry. Transform what is loveless in us, by your Love for us. Amen

The photo is the work of my friend Graeme Clark, who is a gifted photographer and very generous with his skills and time. The image is a detail on the top of the gate to the cloisters of Paisley Abbey. 

Holy Week: Tuesday. "He came from his blest throne..."

He came from his blest throne
  Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
  The longed-for Christ would know.
    But O, my Friend,
      My Friend indeed,
      Who at my need
    His life did spend!

He came to his own people and they didn’t recognise him. How can hearts be so estranged that God walks amongst us as a stranger?  He comes in love and mercy, as our Friend, but we recognise neither Him nor our own need. Holy Week is a time when we bring all that estranges us from God, to the Friend who came to bestow salvation by self-expending love.

Prayer: Lord we are sorry for the sins that estrange, and our failure to recognise you as our Friend indeed. Have mercy on us. Amen

Photo taken September 17, 2023, on South Anderson Drive, Aberdeen, while awaiting the funeral cortege of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The two pigeons add their own poignant note to a day which I found deeply moving. The cruciform image against a blue sky resonates, for me  at least, with Crossman's words in the first two lines. 

Holy Week, Monday: My Song is Love Unknown

This Holy Week we will dwell in the verses of the hymn, My Song is Love Unknown, written by Samuel Crossman in 1664. It has seven verses, one for each day. TFTD will have a verse, a brief meditation, and a short prayer of response. On the flyleaf of the book in which it was first published, the author quoted the words of Paul: “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

My song is love unknown,
  My Saviour’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
  That they might lovely be.
    O who am I,
      That for my sake
      My Lord should take
    Frail flesh and die?

Love beyond our knowing, love made so personal ‘to me’, even me; love shown to the loveless, that we might lovely be. Holy Week begins with amazed wonder and a declaration of the Saviour’s love. The hymn begins as love speaks its truth four times with gentle insistence. Then in four brief lines, the long drawn out self-questioning of one who is both ashamed and amazed. The question “Who am I?” is to be asked, with head bowed in breathless awe – love to the loveless shown…frail flesh…for my sake. 

Prayer: Lord and Saviour, this week we turn in both repentance and joy towards the love that wins the loveless and makes them lovely, because loved. Amen

The photo is my own, and was taken on Aberdeen beach following a storm that exposed the old breakwaters. From a particular angle the the cross and heart shape coincided. And yes, I did get my feet wet taking the photo!

Palm Sunday and the Scandal of the Disappearing Donkey!

1 Ride on, ride on in majesty!
as all the tribes 'Hosanna!' cry:
Thine humble beast pursues his road,
With palms and scattered garments strowed.

2 Ride on, ride on in majesty!
in lowly pomp ride on to die:
O Christ, thy triumph now begin
O'er captive death, and conquered sin!

3 Ride on, ride on in majesty!
The winged squadrons of the sky
Look down with sad and wondering eyes
To see the approaching sacrifice.

4 Ride on, ride on in majesty,
The last and fiercest strife is nigh:
The Father, on his sapphire throne,
Expects his own anointed Son.

5 Ride on, ride on in majesty,
In lowly pomp ride on to die:
Bow thy meek head to mortal pain,
Then take, O God, your power and reign!

H. H. Milman, 1821

Right! Let's start with some of the well-intentioned 'improvements' of various hymn book editors.

Ride on, ride on in majesty
as all the crowds 'Hosanna!' cry:
through waving branches slowly ride,
O Saviour, to be crucified.

Those last two lines of the first verse are a complete rewrite! In line two, I guess modern sensitivities will prefer the amorphous 'crowds' to the biblical term for diversity, 'tribes'. In English, 'tribes' and tribalism carry negative baggage, a veiled condescending echo of patronising colonialism. But, yes, crowds works just as well as tribes, and is less problematic.

But then the donkey disappears! Now granted Milman's line 3 about the ' humble beast' is hardly poetic genius, but it does evoke the narrative of the Gospel of Matthew on which the hymn is based. It also plays into the irony and paradox of the entire hymn, about a humble and humiliated Messiah submitting to the will of God.

The donkey is not a war horse, that's the point! And in the next verse, 'lowly pomp', which the hymn re-writers leave unchanged, has the intended rhetorical force of an oxymoron which carried enough Christological meaning to be repeated in the last verse.

I think Milman knew perfectly well what he was doing when he wrote "Thine humble beast pursues his road" - apart from anything else, Jesus riding a donkey is surrounded by those who have no such humility, and soon will show they also lack the humane qualities of a donkey bearing the Saviour's weight. The palms and scattered garments testify to excitement, not loyalty, and suggest more a simmering riot than a good natured day out for the family! The whole hymn advances to the slow beat of foreboding, fate and finality, the steady plod of the donkey towards its rider's Passion. 

One other change worth noting is in verse three line 2.

Ride on, ride on in majesty
the angel armies of the sky
look down with sad and wondering eyes
to see the approaching sacrifice.

I'm sorry, but "The angel armies of the sky" has nothing like the mystical and metaphysical force of "The winged squadrons of the sky..."! Isaiah chapter six should be enough for any interfering hymn-book editor to know why Milman used such a circumlocution for the simpler word 'angels'. This is about God's messengers rendered helpless to intervene, restrained by God! Remember Milman was writing nearly a century before winged flight became a reality for human beings. This is divine power and enforcement intentionally constrained by divine purpose.

There are times when hymns are genuinely improved by light editing. But the removal of metaphors, biblical allusion and symbolic resonance from a fairly straightforward hymn, simply diminishes its power. Allowed to retain the original, albeit slightly odd language, a hymn like this can force us to think outside the limits of our cultural vocabulary. Our culture, both in church and outside it, seems impatient with, and perhaps even resistant to, religious language expressing transcendence, mystery and that which trips us up precisely because it makes us think.

As to the hymn itself, I think it's a tour de force, pulling us into a story as it unfolds, and making us watch to the end, an end we already know but need to hear again, and again. That final verse is what Amos Wilder called theopoetics, theology expressed through poetic imagination in order to fly below the radar of prosaic reason.

"Lowly pomp" refers to the startling reversal of values taking place on that Palm Sunday parade. Jesus comes as a King to reign, from the cross. The Father throned in sapphire expects the return of his Son, surrendered to death, and raised from death. The Crucified reigns in power, but it is the power of atoning love, the chosen road of self-giving sacrifice winding up to Calvary, the final obedience to the Father of "He who knew no sin being made sin that we might become the righteousness of God." 

Ride on, ride on in majesty! That line is at the start of each verse, laden with irony, laced with defiance. The majesty of the cross, the meekness of the crucified, the humble beast pursuing its road, the adulation of the crowds, the temporary grounding of the 'winged squadrons', the Father throned in the sapphire light of holy love; all culminate in triumph, which is no surprise since it was already anticipated in verse two:

Ride on, ride on in majesty!
in lowly pomp ride on to die:
O Christ, thy triumph now begin
O'er captive death, and conquered sin!

It's Been a Good Afternoon and Now I'm Tired, in a Good Way.

So, this afternoon...

Time in the Library chasing a couple of my favourite poets and browsing books that are unaffordable but because of the library, accessible. The picture is from a window desk on Floor 4

 

A visit with an old and dear friend, reminiscing about the diversity and embarrassment of riches in the previous generation of members of our church, including where they sat, and memorable stories of characters whose spirituality and humanity wove coloured patterns of joy into our fellowship.

 

The gift of a handwritten book of prayers, written by several neat longhand writers over two generations, and used as prayers of blessing at the Lord's Supper. The time frame spans around 80 years. There's a snapshot of Baptist spirituality at the Communion Table waiting to be developed from a close reading of these prayers; some of which I heard being used in the 1980's.

 

A complete surprise delivery of a small hamper containing fine food from someone who sent it as "a tiny blessing" after, and again I quote, " a quite amazing sermon on Sunday" That hasn't happened before!

 

And a book delivered, recommended by a friend who knows about and exemplifies such things, and especially things about music, theology, poetry and art, and how all of these together help us grow in our humanity and spirituality. Jeremy Begbie, Resounding Truth. Christian Wisdom in the World of Music. (Grand rapids: Baker, 2007)

 

Not a bad few hours of life Jim!