Living Wittily

Van Gogh, Thomas Merton and Rowan Williams - and the connection is?

Had a good day yesterday when important things have been done, said and enjoyed.  Journeyed to Glendoick to meet my friend Ken where we spent several hours at the garden centre. In the taciturn and occasionally nasty summer we're having the day was sunny, clear views for miles and the roads still quietish at the end of the school holidays. We don't get the chance to meet often so we tend to make a meal of it. This time we made two meals of it, a bacon and egg roll and a pot of tea, an hour's walk, then Carrot and orange soup with herb scones.

We've been friends more than half our lives and though we'd planned another bookshop crawl in Edinburgh, a civilised conversation over good food for three hours was much to be preferred.

Got home and listened to Albinoni's Oboe Concerto in D Minor while writing and reading, and gloating (no other word will do) over recently bought books. The slow movement of this concerto should be played quietly while reading one of the great narratives of divine and human tenderness in the gospels - for me the encounter of Mary Magdalene with Jesus in the garden.

Of the books being gloated over the one I read next will be The Yellow House, Martin Gayford, (Penguin) is the account of Van Gogh, Gaugin and nine turbulent weeks in Arles. Two geniuses with all their psychological complexities, artists at the zenith of their talent and the extremes of innovation, both eager for friendship but encountering in each other the greatest obstacle to mutual friendship! While working on the Sunflowers tapestry I'm keeping in touch with Vincent in different ways - not trying to understand him, which I think is neither possible nor necessary. But to know the whence of the chaos and the wherefore of the genius, to accept and respect the relationship between his illness and inner turmoil and the immense achievements of his art, and to have an emotional context out of which to work an impression of his favourite painting, and the focus of his desperate longing for sunlight, hope and inner rest.  

 

One of the traits of the bibliophile is gloating over a forthcoming book yet to be printed! This one brings together the Christian whose writing has shaped my own spirituality and thinking in ways decisive for my view of ministry, myself, human relationships, the nature of prayer and the paradoxical imperatives of community, silence and solitude as places and times where and when God is to be found. Ever since I read The Seven Storey Mountain, followed by Thoughts in Solitude I have never had a year when I haven't read Merton's writing. This forthcoming book is by Rowan Williams, and I can't think of someone I'd rather have exploring and reflecting on Merton's continuing relevance in a world where the things Merton made deep concerns remain deeply concerning - cultural conflicts, violence, consumer greed, cultural superficiality and human creativity turned against human interests and flourishing. Merton's great insight that the contemplative was a necessary presence in a world in desperate need of redemption, righteousness, peace and justice remains a major portion of his legacy that is of enduring value. He spoke into the cultural urgencies and reconfigurations of the 50's and 60's and much that he wrote remains valid half a century later. Is that because human nature, our profligacy and pretensions, our anger, angst and anxiety, our propensity for self-preservation and self-harm, remain humanity's greatest threat? And thus a great and fallible human being like Merton can bring together the contemplative and the active, the promise of divine grace enabling human goodness, the monk as holy person in whose prayers are gathered up the broken pieces of a God loved world?

Karine Polwart, Folk Singing and the Prophetic Imagination

It's becoming an enjoyable if unpredictable habit. Innocently driving down or up the road to Paisley listening to the radio and there's a moment of illumination, or a coincidence of mood and music, or the fusion of idle thought and good ideas, or the interruption of the complacent routine by the unsettlingly different. It was the last of these this morning. I was ambushed by a song that compels our consideration of an unsettlingly different view of ourselves, our world and our responses to life around us.

On Radio Scotland I heard the haunting voice of Karine Polwart singing Better Things, the lyrics deceptively gentle in their subversive questioning of the way things are. And that lyrical gentleness and acoustic melody pushes ideas through our road metal defences like patiently persistent green shoots whose life force won't be denied the life giving sun even by the tarmac surface of minds hardened by the endless traffic of excess experience, information overload and sensory saturation that is our post- modern networked, globalised, rapid-feed culture. And yes, that is a long sentence, and a few over-wrought metaphors - perhaps.

The truth is that some of our best folk singers fulfil the role of prophet, and speak truth to power. They do this by calling in question the assumptions of the powerful, they dare to interrogate the ethics of political decisions, they refuse to accept that the economic bottom line has some kind of absolute veto on human compassion, is the reality check for kindness, or makes an ethical generosity foolish, unrealistic, or even worse, unaffordable.

The song Better Things does several of these things in oblique poetry that is at the same time a profound questioning of the wisdom of the world. Here are the words, and Karine polwart's own reasons for writing them given at the end:

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

For now we deal with those for whom
A life is but a carnal tomb
In which the darkness holds no power
And neither does the final hour

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

We may lament the deadly art
Of tiny atoms torn apart
Of visions that we can't return
And future fires in which we fear we'll burn

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

Yet this is the art of those before
Who found a cure within the core
The noble mind behind the ray
That eased our earthly cares away

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

Words & Music: Karine Polwart (Bay Songs Ltd 2007)
I wrote this for the "Bin The Bomb" campaign in protest at the UK Government's decision to re-commission the Trident generation of nuclear weapons. I just think maybe there are a few imaginative and constructive ways to spend £30 billion or so that don't involve weapons of mass destruction.

Swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, and technology turned towards the healing of the wounds of the world - I too can think of better things that hands can make, and hearts can sing.

The Disabled, The Minimum Wage, and Mr Davies' Preposterous Idea

There are times when the statements emanating from members of the current Government simply have to be named for the nonsense they are.

And sometimes named as the dangerous nonsense they are.

The latest is the suggestion by Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley, that disabled people and people with mental ill health issues, should be allowed to / prepared to work for less than the minimum wage of £5.93 an hour.

The ostensible justification is that such a move would make disabled people and people with mental ill health more employable by offering a financial advantage to the employer.

That this creates an entire new pool of cheap labour, based on discrimination seems to have escaped Mr Davies.

That it sends a powerful social signal of devaluation likewise seems to surprise him.

Look at the article in the link, from the Daily Telegraph, which is hardly at the left wing of British political journalism See here

Now Shipley has a different tradition of both politics and theological viewpoint. P T Forsyth was once the Congregational minister there. He wrote a booklet on "Socialism, the Church and the Poor". Wonder what he would have written to Mr Davies as his local MP?

When all allowances are made for the MP's back-tracking and special pleading of good intentions towards those with disabilities and mental ill-health, it remains embarrassing, preposterous and outrageous that an MP should even think let alone articulate such a suggestion.

I'm not questioning his right to hold such views, or to state them. (Though the Equality and Diversity and Discrimination watchdogs are more than interested in a conversation about them).

I am however questioning whether his view has any ethical validity, discerning compassion, or social wisdom - his suggestion seems on the contrary to be ethically vacuous, cynically insensitive and socially reckless.

Downing St has distanced itself from the statement - but I await an outright apology and rebuke that a member of the Government has spoken such, well, such nonsense - I just spell checked this sentence and had originally written nosense, which is also true.

Should members of the BNP be allowed to teach in our schools? No!

The link at the end of this post is to the recent report by Maurice Smith (pictured) that says the prohibition on teachers being members of the BNP would be "a disproportionate response", a "very large sledgehammer to crack a minuscule nut." Right.

The report also suggests there is no causal connection between being a member of a political party, holding certain political views, and the influence a teacher has in a classroom. Oh, and just to be clear, a teacher's politics has no place in the classroom. Right.

Now when I use the word right, I don't mean I agree; and it is not used as explicit (or implicit) moral approval. Actually just to be clear - I am using it with a full measure of West of Scotland irony reinforced by well informed scpeticism, as in the phrase, "Aye right"!

Let's not play silly word games by which we are meant to think that politics and political opinion, political conviction, political judgement, political values are all reducible to private ways of viewing the world. Or that such inner orientations of thought, moral judgement, political vision and social organisation never impinge on how we actually relate to the world and the people in it. Politics if taken half seriously, and a member of a political party should be assumed to take their party's policies and manifesto seriously, politics is the way we describe and work towards the way we would wish the world to be.

And if a person's politics are about a racially based approach to social structures, a narrow definition of nationalism, a resistance to multi-cultural presence, an insistence on Britishness (whatever that is) as critierion of welcome, then there is overwhelming likelihood that such political views will indeed influence the way those people relate to other people. A BNP member who is a teacher in a multi-ethnic school, in a multicultural society, with several asylum seeking children in the class, is not going to pretend, surely, that policies of exclusion which he or she upholds as conviction, somehow do not exist in the day to day dealings with a socially, culturally and racially diverse class. Sorry - I don't believe such convictional conjuring tricks are possible - and if they were they would be even more dangerous for their two faced janus-like deception.

Quite apart from all the above, education is not politically neutral, and teachers are not politically colourless. A teacher is entrusted with tasks of social education, humane learning, instilling values of civic responsibility, enabling and encouraging relationships of co-operative working, mutual respect and preparation for a life of responsible contribution to our society. I simply don't accept that such a vision of educational purpose is compatible with BNP policies and manifesto statements. And because I believe members of the BNP sincerely hold the convictions and values of their Party manifesto, there can be no congruence between political views and a social vision so wildly out of line with the values of an educational system whose underlying assumptions are inclusive, mutually respectful of cultural difference, and embedded in a civic code that does not diminish the humanity or value of other people on such dangerous grounds as race, ethnic origin, faith tradition, or that morally (and rationally) dubious benchmark of Britishness.

Lest I haven't made myself clear; as a follower of Jesus Christ, a lover of people in God's name, a citizen who recognises the rights and worth of others who come to live amongst us and who believes in a society that is just and compassionate, I think the report is wrong. Membership of the BNP should indeed disqualify someone from teaching in our schools. Maurice Smith the former Chief Inspector of Schools is simply wrong in his conclusions. Worse still, he has produced a report lacking in moral seriousness, for which he has substituted risibly strident rhetoric that makes little reference to the realities of teaching, the ethic of education, nor the responsibility that comes with living in a democracy, of discerning with care the fundamental obligations and human values that ensure real freedoms.

http://news.aol.co.uk/racism-report-backs-teacher-freedom/article/20100312012850152666193?icid=mai

When tears are the words of our prayers.

Sometimes the coincidence of incongruence can become a prophetic and moving glimpse into mystery.

I came across the photo below last night, while browsing the Archbishop of Canterbury's website. Two holy men, and I mean that word, stand together. They are recognised leaders of two traditions that flow from Abraham, a confluence of faiths.

Behind them the evil enigma of Auschwitz, the rail lines converging on the gate of death, and the remembered anguish of millions, beyond comprehension, but requiring to be remembered. Christian and Jew, standing together, dressed in black, their faces unable to tell the story, but etched with immense sadness.

All this I am thinking, while Johnny Cash beats out his theme song, and one of my most favourite tracks on any record, Man in Black. And just as I happen on this picture, he's singing:

"I wear it for the thousands who have died,

believing that the Lord was on their side,

I wear it for another hundred thousand who had died,

believing that we all were on their side."

And the incongruent coincidence of music, the photograph, the memories of books I've read written by these two spiritual guides of our age - too much, and I cried.

And thus prayed. Kyrie eleison.

If truth is the first casualty of war, then untruth is often the first causality of war!

The Iraq war is a tragedy, whatever its legal justification.

When that legal justification is so politicised that the basis of the decision is coated in teflon misinformation, then tragedy deepens.

Some witnesses at the current Iraq enquiry have been depressingly predictable in their use of Orwellian discourse; so human tragedy is trivialised by self serving rhetoric.

Faith in the overall process of truth gathering is not helped by a recently announced 70 year gagging order on papers relating to the death of Dr Kelly, the expert on Weapons of Mass Destruction, whose suicide remains a tragic enigma.

The former Attorney General was quite open about his total change of mind following a visit to the United States and consultation with US lawyers from the State department.

At no time, we are told, was his arm twisted, by US or UK senior politicians. So we are left to conclude that US lawyers are more competent in International Law relating to war and UN Resolutions than our own Attorney General.

Today Tony Blair gives evidence. We already heard some of his case for his own defence on the Fern Britton interview. And it would be wrong to prejudge what he will say, I suppose.

So rather than say more I want to quote a passage from Thomas Merton, The Non-Violent Alternative, (published 1971 several years after Merton's death):

"War-makers in the twentieth century have gone far toward creating a political language so obscure, so apt for treachery, so ambiguous, that it can no longer serve as an instrument for peace; it is good only for war. But why? because the language of the war-maker is self-enclosed in finality. It does not invite reasonable dialogu, it uses language to silence dialogue, to block communication, so that instead of words the two sides may trade divisions, positions, villages, air bases, cities - and of course the lives of the peoploe in them. The daily toll of the killed (or the "kill ratio") is perfunctorily scrutinized and decoded. And the totals are expertly managed by "ministers of truth" so that the newspaper reader may get the right message.

Our side is always ahead. He who is winning must be the one who is right. But we are right, therefore we must be winning. Once again we have the beautiful, narcissistic tautology of war - or of advertising...There is no communicating with anyone else, because anyone who does not agree, who is outside the charmed circle, is wrong, is evil, is already in hell." (Merton in Non Violent Alternative, 243-44)

Forty years on Merton's words are worth reading again,

after we hear the news reports of what was said,

what wasn't said,

and what wasn't said in what was said,

at the Iraq inquiry today.

"The greatest of these is love" - On not looking too hard for the Church's raison d'etre

Below is the Prayer of Intercession I composed and offered within the worship service at which I was also preaching yesterday. I don't often post prayers of my own. This one touches deep places in the way I look at the world, the church and the people who move in and out of our lives. If using some or all of it lifts your heart and hands to God so much better. It is written around the seldom noted superlative at the end of I Corinthians 13, "Faith, hope and love remain, but the greatest of these is love". For all our talk of mission and missional - there is a job description for the Church that isn't hard to understand - just hard to live in, live up to, live towards. 

Eternal God and Father,

Whose infinite yet intimate love

shared from all eternity between Father, Son and Spirit,

is the same love you have poured into our hearts by that same Holy Spirit.

 

 We pray for all those people in our lives,

Who have been touched and transformed by love,

faithful, unselfish, generous, joyful, love.

Lifelong friends and good neighbours

wives and husbands, parents and children,

sisters and brothers, best friends and new friends

overcoming differences in language, race, gender, religion.

O God, in that rich life of love as Father, Son and Spirit,

We see love’s inexhaustible possibilities:

 

So we pray for those whose lives are broken for lack of love:

Children whose safety and health come second to adult demands;

Friendships ended by exploitation and backstabbing;

Marriages shredded by unfaithfulness and broken promises;

Families fractured by social pressures, whether poverty or affluence;

Neighbourhoods where love is weakness and compassion despised

Businesses whose bottom line isn’t the welfare of the work-force;

 

We pray for Churches, and for our church

which you have called to be the Body of Christ,

to embody and to model the love of God in Christ,

which is gift of the Spirit and the sign of your Presence

May our love for others, like your eternal love,

Be generously given, lovingly available,

patiently faithful, willingly sacrificial

persistently hopeful, and self-evidently joyful.

 

We pray for those we’ve only heard of on television,

Those whose lives disintegrate under pressures of hate and violence,

Whose lives are in different ways, damaged, diminished, defeated,

by the absence of love, a vacuum filled by the power of hate.

Two boys whose home was so toxic they tortured other children

The 19 year old whose reckless driving killed his friend

The mother who made her own son ill, to gain media attention

The teacher injured trying to separate fighting pupils

The baby abducted in Ireland, and returned on the Cathedral steps

The Sikh neighbour stabbed to death defending a young woman from a mugger

These and so many more, human lives caught in the crossfire of love and hate,

we hold them before your healing mercy:

 

God of love and hope,

we pray for our society, our city, our neighbourhoods,

and for ourselves as your ambassadors of love

Make us ministers of reconciliation with a passion for peacemaking

Fill us with compassion for the poor, the hungry, the lonely

Like Jesus gives us eyes to see Zacchaeus hiding in shame;

courage to ask the name of violent terrified Legion;

to stand between the vulnerable victim and those holding the stones;

to touch with tender risk those who like the leper are feared and excluded;

to see the best in the Samaritan and go do likewise –

to open our arms in welcome like the prodigal father

to take our loaves and fishes and bless them to the use of others,

and so to be perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect;

whose sunlight love gives life to all within its radiance,

whose rain of mercy falls with life giving refreshment,

who reaches out with a love that warms and waters,

embraces, holds and heals a broken world,

and all this, in Jesus' name and in the power of the Spirit,

Amen.

Kay Carmichael - Social Reformer, Academic Teacher, Peace Activist - She looked humanely forth on human life

By the time I met Kay Carmichael in 1974 she was already a highly respected and influential leader in social policy. She had served on The Kilbrandon Committee in 1964, under whose Report recommendations the Scottish Children's Hearing System came into being under the Children's (Scotland) Act 1968. The introduction of Children's Panels not only decriminalised many of the actions of children normally taken before Juvenile Court, they moved thinking from punishment to help. The approach recognised that many childhood difficulties, including neglect, abuse, criminal activity and other situations that put children at risk, required to be addressed with support, understanding and actions taken "in the best interests of the child", and decided by trained members of the local community guided by a Children's Reporter, and in conversation with the responsible adults in the child's life. The philosophy underlying these policies was, and remains, creative, forward looking, and optimistic about the difference that can be made in young lives if good decisions and adequate resources can be put in place. The result is a way of viewing children and their families that is widely admired across the world; and one which successive Scottish Governments do well to maintain, develop and protect from those accountancy viruses that so destructively undermine in the interests of money the health of something almost unqualifiedly good.

Later in the 1970's Kay Carmichal was involved in the Lilybank project, working with those on benefits in the East End of Glasgow. Controversially she went incognito for three months, and was filmed living on the Benefit Level of £10.50 per week. She exposed the humiliation, the indignity, the sheer grinding inuhumanity, that so many people encounter in dealing with the State Welfare system. Again, what was being demonstrated and thought through was the revolutionary impact on social policy of respect for persons and humane social policy as default values in a political philosophy.

She began working with the most violent prisoners, trying to reconnect alienated people of violence to the community. It was experimental thinking like hers that would lead to the setting up of the Barlinnie Special Unit, once again encouraging at the level of policy-making, the search for understanding, relational co-operation, and how to harness the resources of the wider community in addressing social and human failings. Later in life she explored much more deeply the issues of sin and forgiveness, society's response to criminality and the deeper human questions of restorative justice and human rehabilitation. Kay Carmichael was my teacher, the best kind, who managed to combine impressive intellect, creative pragmatism and awareness of the significance of teaching young minds to look humanely forth on human life. There is therefore something deeply moving about the thought that she completed her PhD on Sin and Forgiveness at the age of 76, after a lifetime's professional, academic and political experience in the social implications of human failure and community response, sin and forgiveness.

More could be said - her lifelong anti-nuclear activism as a peace delinquent (her word), her work on behalf of those ensnared in prostitution, her instinctive resistance to all kinds of social discrimination, her support for schemes to give disabled people the right to as much independent living as they could manage, and her deep moral antipathy to poverty that in her view is not inevitable, if only we could develop a more humane politics and a less ruthless economics.

Social work is a hard place to be now. Seldom are those who work within the systems rewarded by public respect, moral support, and a wider awareness of just how hard it is to get everything right all of the time. And I do have a troubling suspicion that future Kay Carmichaels may be unable to break free of the current love affair in large service providers, with micro-managed constraints that discourage creative reflection, and avoid the risk of experiment. Which in turn suppresses (as by product or deliberate policy the result is the same) the expression in professional theory and practice of that social compassion, those imaginative ideas that are building blocks of vision.

For now I salute this woman whose articulate and passionate voice spoke for so many whose voices were seldom listened to. And time spent in her class was as important in the formation of my understanding of a truly pastoral and good news ministry as love for others, as any other course I took - including an intense theological training in our own College.

There is a fine Obituary in the Scotsman here. I haven't found an online photo of Kay. Her funeral service will take place in Glasgow later today. I greatly regret I won't be able to be there, so this post is intended as a modest acknowledgement of an immodest personal debt - by the way her funeral is to be followed by champagne and sausage rolls at a local hotel - how characteristic is that!

Health and safety and the way we do our thinking.

Reading about Dorothy Day over the past few weeks has been cause for critical reflection on a number of unhelpful assumptions that clutter up the floor of my mental workshop, and that in the real world would be removed by anyone schooled in health and safety procedures. Interesting concept - a health and safety inspection of the way we do our thinking!! Here's three correctives to such unhelpful assumptions.

One. Just because someone isn't a recognised theologian doesn't mean they aren't. Day never claimed to be, never wanted to be known as, a theologian. But the way she lived her life on the values of the Sermon on the Mount, used her mind to think through the meaning of each human being's existence and value, conflated prayer and social action, ignited compassion with the fire of the Gospel of Jesus, confronted the powers not only with obstinate protest but with lucid argument articulating the nature of God in Christ. She was a theologian alright.

Two. Spirituality has to do with the inner life and piety of the individual. Not so. True spirituality is expressed through the outward witness in works of mercy of a Christ-responsive community. Coming from an Evangelical context I recognise the deadly temptations of what my own College Principal used to call "grovelling around in the dark recesses or comfortable sofas of our own souls".  Day knew the problem. "To cook for one's self, to eat by one's self, to sew, wash, clean for one's self is a sterile joy. Community, whether of family, or convent, or boarding house, is absolutely necessary." It isn't that I don't know that. It's just that spirituality in a consumer culture is always in danger of being an unholy search for personal customer satisfaction. By contrast, Day found God in the messiness of people's lives, in the friction of personal relationships, and in those places where injustice and suffering went unchallenged - until she and others like her went there in Jesus' name and orchestrated a collision of worldviews.

Three. Personal sanctity is a life goal. Not so. Sanctity pursued has no purchasing power for the truly holy person. The self-conscious pursuit of holiness was, in Day's judgement, a deflection from the life of discipleship. When followers of Christ seek him amongst the poor, witness to the Kingdom of God with faithfulness before the powers that hurt and exploit, enact in lifestyle and embodied practices the forgiveness and peacemaking of God, then just at those points where personal holiness is the least concern, sanctity is invisble but obvious. Even in her lifetime some suggested to her she was a saint - her reply, "No. I can't be dismissed that easily".

Three will do for now. My final post Dorothy will include a couple of Dorothy's subversive interpretations, either of Jesus' words or of the actions consistent with Jesus' own subversive lifestyle of self-giving and peacemaking love. Jim Forest's brief biography is entitled Love is the Measure. And so it is.

If love is interpreted with the full costliness of the Gospel

and love modelled on Jesus is lived as a tough and compassionate alternative to the uncaring selfishness of contemporary culture

and love is understood as a Gospel critique of all social injustice that diminishes, discriminates and deprives further the least of Christ's brothers and sisters

and Love is 

Incarnated in practices and habits of compassion

Cruciform in its shape and self expenditure

Resurrection pointing in its vitalising hopefulness

Pentecostal in its dependence on the Spirit who pours the love of God into human hearts

Trinitarian in its reaching out to those who are other

Eschatological as the contemporary enactment of the final reality of a universe where God will be all in all

because in the end, as at the beginning, God is love.

The central mystery of Christmas and the human predicament

This blog began as a way of sharing much of what I think, feel and believe about many things.

I've kept it going because it combines the discipline of writing with the fun of sharing.

It's a forum for theological reflection on the stuff that happens, and also a place for exploring with others the fruit of reading and thinking. 

Now and again, a blog allows not only wider conversations, but deeper ones - the old fashioned phrase "the human predicament" is only old fashioned in terminology, not in reality. As human beings we are indeed in a bit of a predicament - God help us!

And in addition to all that, this blog is for me some substitute for that part of me that always leans towards opening conversations with others around what it means in practice to follow faithfully after Jesus today.

That's all asking a lot, but there it is.

Sometime on Christmas Day the electronic counter will indicate that the 100,000th visitor clicked in. I hope the importance of that isn't only an ego thing - but an indicator that people find stuff here that is worth the bother of looking in the first place.

Anyway.

In a world where even peace prizes no longer seem to make a lot of sense

where post Copenhagen climate change raises major issues of justice to future generations

where religious ideological conflict is replacing the old cold war dichotomy

and where the economic and political self-interest of the rich create dangerous pressures against the poorer half of the world;

in a world like that, our world,

may we know the dawning reality of the Love that moves the earth and the stars,

may we gaze again on the central mystery of the Word become flesh whose glory we behold,

and may we live in obedience to Jesus Christ,

the One whose mission of peacemaking and reconciling love

defines the Christian God,

and sets the trajectories for our own life mission within and beyond the Church.

And in the light of that - a joyous Christmas to you all.