Living Wittily

Academic Administration: necessary tedium and / or exciting experiement?

Amongst the many horizons that have opened up to me in recent years, few have been more personally enriching and theologically challenging than academic administration. Yes. You are quite correct. Not a miss-print, nor a mind flip, not even a joke. AA. Not the Automobile Association, so hard pressed in the recent and returning climate of traffic paralysis. Not Alcoholics Anonymous, that wonderful organisation that, despite its faults and drawbacks, has drawn back many a life from the brink and enabled human beings to discover again their dignity, humanity and purpose. Not stranded motorists then, nor people at the end of the line all but destroyed by alcohol addiction - but something altogether more prosaic - AA, the discipline, skill, and ever recurring demands of ensuring that learning and teaching are up to scratch, quality assured, demonstrably effective. Academic Administration.

Now I admit I too have seen AA as an algae outbreak in the garden pond, until I realised it might instead be the aerator and filter that keeps the water healthy. Now yes - some academic admin is tedious but necessary, and some is tedious and repetitive and harder to justify. And there's too much of it. (Warning: two long sentences ahead!) But in thinking about theological education, and how to shape a curriculum for 21st Century  Graduates in Theology, whose vocational trajectory is ministry of one kind or another, and for some, definitely pastoral ministry in the uniquely varied context of Scottish Baptist faith communities, the necessary clarity, scrutiny and rigour has come from thought disciplined by educational theory, ideas shaped by academic experience, and our limited small-world agendas pushed outwards by the requirement to demonstrate we know what we are doing! If theological education is to be taken seriously within the academy (and I refuse to have the word academic used always negatively, dismissively, pejoratively, as if loving God with our minds were not at least a quarter of what it means to love God at all!); so if theological education is to gain respectful hearing and serious consideration as a way of knowing, living and acting faithfully in our world, then it should not only survive in the academy, but earn the right to speak, be heard and make a difference to how we understand what a University is about.

That is why I'm spending much of my time with documentation, Module Descriptors, Programme Specifications, Regulatory Frameworks, QAA Handbooks, SCQF Articulations, Subject Benchmarks, and Annual Monitoring processes heavy on evaluative reflection. If AA is required of the Sciences and the Social Sciences, of Computing and Business, of Health and Engineering, then why not of Divinity?  One particular area of increasing reflection in the wider HE sector is "Attributes of the 21st Century Graduate". Some of the work done here is very helpful in identifying the kinds of persons we ideally want to produce through an effective, distinctive and high quality course of personal and academic formation. So. What might be the attributes of the 21st Century Graduate in Theology and Pastoral Studies. Ideally, what kind of person should emerge from a Degree aimed at training people for ministry in the 21st Century?

From a  lengthy process of consultation, reflection, and distillation I have formulated eight, which will form the basis of a paper I hope to have published soon. Do any of you readers  want to have a go at suggesting attributes both essential and desirable, of the 21st Century Graduate in Theology and Pastoral Studies? You are allowed up to three.

By the way, to raise the issue during Advent might seem another AA - Advent Aberration brought on by seasonal over excitement; or AA - Altogether Annoying distraction from seasonal themes; or yet Another Argument not worth having before Christmas:)) Indulge me - make your suggestion a gesture of goodwill.....

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.

Induction, covenant and celebration - Catriona has arrived in Scotland!

Every induction of a minister to a pastorate is an event to be celebrated, a covenant to be sealed by promises, a confirmation yet again of the surprising call of God to all too human people to serve the Body of Christ, the Church. As Baptists we gladly hold to the practice of making covenant. A church is a gathering of believers who in their membership of the local church, embody the promise to walk together, faithfully, after Christ. And the call of God is to do so together, and to persevere and work at it even if at times it exhausts patience and breaks the heart. And to do this while also knowing that in the shared fellowship of the journey, they have discovered joy, the understanding of others, the generosity that humbles, and that one surprise, repeated so mercifully often, that one surprise of being loved.

 And so to Hillhead Baptist Church on Saturday October 3rd, and Catriona's induction. Most people who visit this blog will know Catriona as the skinny fair trade latte blogger (see sidebar), minister till recently of Hugglescote Baptist Church (aka Dibley). I met her the year before she went to Hugglescote, and then several times more recently as she came up to Scotland to meet those who will now be the congregation amongst whom her ministry will be. The Induction service was built around the theme and the experience of making covenant. Catriona told her story, the Church told theirs, and we sensed how these stories coincided. And of course the church from which Catriona came, Hugglescote Baptist Church, they too are part of the story and they were there too. Then Catriona and the Church made promises, and in our prayers we laid hands not only on the new minister, but on representatives of the congregation, so that they set out together on their journey, in covenant with each other, and looking to God to lead, accompany and hold them true to themselves and each other. All of this gathered together by Ruth Gouldbourne, preacher for the day, under the deceptively simple command, "Be kind to one another". Except that kindness is patterned after the kindnes of God, who in Christ chooses to be kind, to come close, to empathise, to walk the way of human life.

Then there was the biblically mandated buffet meal. This is one of my favourite icons, depicting an early buffet meal, complete with angels unawares. The fact that the icon images the Trinity and the Triune communion of love and perichoretic purpose, enriches further the idea of hospitality. Food, good talk, laughter, the shared satisfaction of being together, the courteous recognition of the other, the welcome that makes the presence of another both wanted and felt to be wanted, - and all expressed with good food, the mutuality of serving, and the fun of not knowing everyone who is there, providing opportunities to reach out with the offer of our name and the gift of their name.

So the day closed around 8.pm and we made our way home. But only after taking time to acknowledge the spiritual potency of those occasions when you know you stand on the brink of new possibility. And however hard we try, and no matter how much we think we ourselves achieve, we know that those possibilities come to be, not merely or mainly through our energy, but because when it comes to kindness, God takes the lead. He is there long before us; his generosity has no inbuilt limitations, and time and again we discover to our embarrasment, his grace second-guesses our needs.

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Sisters of Sinai - best lecture I've heard in years!

On Thursday night last, Janet Soskice was all that you want in a philosophical theologian delivering a public lecture which is the story of two Ayrshire Victorian women and their extraordinary contribution to NT textual criticism. In their fifties they visited Mt Sinai Monastery and discovered a palimpsest on which were the faded words of the four Gospels, dating back much earlier than previously known texts, and representing a crucial comparative landmark for textual critics.

My childhood was spent in Ayrshire. One of my side-interests is the history of NT Interpretation. Biography is a favourite genre and an important theological resource in its own right. My own subject fields are theology and history of Christianity, but this was a masterclass in controlled erudition laced with gentle but telling humour. Add to these Soskice's gift for telling a story and building a rounded biographical portrait of these two remarkable women, and the obvious sub-stratum of assiduous research behind this lecture - and it was indeed a very satisfying evening.

Sheila and I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I sent an email to say thank you to Dr Soskice for telling this story, and recovering the contribution of two women to NT scholarship. The work of excavating lives like these from a largely male dominated history remains an important form of protest and balance restoration in historiography, and perhaps particularly in the historiography of Church history. Even in the telling of the story of these two women, the academic jealousies of Victorian Cambridge, the in-fighting of male scholars claiming intellectual property rights over their original work, the appearance of Professor William Robertson Smith (one of the greatly wronged scholars in the collision of ideas that accompanied the demise of Victorian Scottish Calvinism thirled to the Westminster Confession) as their sponsor in establishing the importance of their find, all of it a tale of intrigue, amateur versus professional scholarship, and huge stakes. If this story is dramatised for TV it would be rivetting viewing - the book on which the lecture was based is now on sale. It's a dead cert holiday read for Sheila and I. The story of a key episode in NT scholarship that doesn't even get a footnote in the standard histories - unlike Tischendorff, they were women, and they didn't remove the codex - they photographed it onto glass slides and then returned to transcribe it. Oh, and by the way, these Irvine lassies (amateur scholars, indeed!), taught themselves Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Egyptian, Syriac - and the Syriac was mastered in 9 months!

Evangelical disenchantment and disenchanted evangelicals.

One school of thought suggests that conversion and subsequent religious activity under the Methodist and Finneyan revivals helped empower women in such areas as public speaking, fundraising, and organisational leadership. Hempton is sceptical. The claim that "evangelical religion through its disruptive piety opened a small but expandable crack in the wall of male power and control", is a tidy theory with too many untidy loose ends.

More liberal groups like the Quakers, Universalists and Unitarians produced many of the women leaders in various abolitionist and emancipationist movements. Hempton points out that relatively few American feminist leaders came from the Evangelical stable, and most of those who did, eventually distanced themselves from it. Early conversion experience, and revivalist affiliations, for some of these women raised as many questions as they answered. Two key areas of intellectual discontent quickly emerged; biblical hermeneutics and evangelical dogma. By 1836 Sarah Grimke was arguing forcefully that any plain reading of the Bible will convince any reasonable mind informed by Christian conviction, that slavery was an abomination to the God who is 'in a peculiar manner the God of the poor and the needy, the despised and the oppressed.'

The open letter Sarah wrote was overtly critical of clergy who condoned slavery either by exegetical underpinning or by expedient silence. This and further letters begin to show a loss of confidence in the Bible as the primary arsenal of male power, and consequently her loss of confidence in any mainline denomination, for none upheld " the Scripture doctrine of the perfect equality of man and woman, which is the fundamental principle of my argument in favour of the ministry of women". (page97) The result of such a theological position was alienation from groups that upheld traditional biblical views - prominent amongst them those sponsored by Evangelicalism. In the minds of feminist activists still prepared to found their views on the Bible, abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women were key areas requiring political activism, the social persuasion of protest and debate, and a much more rigorously critical biblical hermeneutic.

"Love to God manifested by love to his creatures." That was a fundamental and sufficient theology for Sarah Grimke. It wasn't long before opposition to oppression fused with concentration on love as theologically definitive, raised serious questions over key evangelical doctrines founded on penal substitution, human sinfulness and hell. In reaction to such theology, leading Christian feminists adopted an increasingly rationalist and universalist position. Elisabeth Cady Stanton was the philosopher and intellectual engine of much mid- 19th century American feminism. Weighed down by the whole panoply of evangelical dogma, "these gloomy superstitions", these "fears of the unknown and unknowable", she found her way to light and truth by "rational ideas based on scientific facts".

There is something deeply significant, which evangelicals today need to think through with some self-reflective and self-critical candour, that these women, protesting against social and institutional oppression, believed they could trace in evangelical dogma and in evangelical biblical interpretations, ideas on which such oppressive attitudes were uncritically founded. Though 20th Century South African Apartheid or Segregation in the American south may seem extreme cases, they do show that abuses of the biblical text to warrant oppression is too well documented in history to be seriously denied. Alongside that of course, goes the honourable record of people like Wesley, Newton, Wilberforce and a host of other evangelical abolitionists whose contribution was decisive and rooted in a securely biblical theology of humanity.

Another Christian feminist, Frances Willard, moved from evangelical Methodism, to collaborative evangelistic activity with D L Moody, and then disenchantment set in. Her interests were more in social reform, particularly temperance and women's suffrage, and her theology morphed into a faith more inclusively catholic, less biblicist and more speculative even at times dabbling in esoteric spirituality. But again what inexorably drew her away from more evangelical principles, what disenchanted her, was what she saw as the inherently patriarchal and hierarchical exclusiveness of evangelical male clergy. This was coupled with a perceived anti-intellectualism and cultural suspicion pervading and constraining evangelical thought and practice seeking to be "in the world but not of the world." Each of these women, in different degrees, saw such attitudes as both informing and distorting Evangelical hermeneutics, so that patriarchy and the suppression of women's leadership and ministry, were inextricably linked to biblical authority understood in male terms, implemented to male advantage, and based on an almost total monopoly of male biblical scholarship.  A closed shop of biblical knowledge, (and indeed of formal advanced education), they believed, secured male dominated control of ecclesial power

The importance of such research into the individual experiences and personal stories of those who, over two centuries, chose to make an exit from the evangelical big story is self-recommending. But after reading it I'm left with a hard to shake off depression, an inner repentance at the incapacity of many expressions of evangelicalism, historic and contemporary, to respond creatively and live adaptively with difference, able to welcome and learn from valid questions.

Failure to focus on the Gospel as the commanding invitation to follow Jesus in radical love, to join with Jesus in liberating protest, to be ministers of reconciliation through costly peacemaking, to live with open armed welcome that transcends our constructed divisions whether of gender, doctrine or view of the Bible; and instead to indulge in an eager pursuit of self-defeating and corrosive arguments over doctrine, or hard edged definitions of the Gospel whose goal is to claim exclusive possession of truth, while also disenfranchising those who dare to differ. These are amongst the failures that led to evangelical disenchantment, and therefore disenchanted evangelicals making their exit left.

And yes, there is another side to this story - but that gets told in plenty of other books, from responsible history and theological reflection all the way through to unabashed propaganda. For now, evangelicals who read this book with requisite humility, will hear important voices of protest and insider critique, that requires attention and honest self-appraisal - and the criterion of that critique in my view must be the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the extent of our faithfulness in following after Jesus.  

Surrounded by a cloud of great witnesses: Mrs Jeanette Simpson, (nee Rigley), 1914 - 2008.

 I heard yesterday of the death of a special friend who has been part of my life journey since 1967. As a teenager whose life was all over the place I encountered the Rev Charlie Simpson. The result was my first raid into Carluke Baptist Church where I met several remarkable people. And maybe with their permission I'll tell you about them, and why they are landmarks in my own faith journey. One of them was Mrs Simpson, "the minister's wife". Jeanette Simpson and her husband Charlie took an immediate interest in me, despite my unenviable reputation in the town as a teenager. When I was converted on April 16, 1967 it was Charlie Simpson who spoke with me, prayed with me and led me to Christ. And amongst those from whom I learned the significance of hospitality, and I mean welcome into heart as well as home, was Nettie Simpson.

Down through the years of responding to God's call to ministry, my training, and my ordination and induction to my first church in Partick, Mr and Mrs Simpson (I never called either of them by their first names when I spoke with them- then or till now) they were supportive, encouraging and wise guides. When in 1979 Charlie died suddenly, aged 56, I conducted his funeral service, and we have remained close friends of Nettie all these years. Amongst my treasures are some of Charlie's books, including most of my P T Forsyth collection - something else I owe to these two wonderful people.

And so on Tuesday I will conduct Mrs Simpson's funeral, for me an act of gratitude, love and admiration, as well as pastoral care and support for her family. Nettie's time as a minister's wife coincided with a time of narrow exclusiveness in relation to the ministry of women in our churches in Scotland. But I would want to say that the two of them were God's gift to the church, and their ministry of spiritual nurture, open hospitality and willingly borne inconvenience, gave me time and space to grow into the reality of the decision I made. And I have never thought of them as anything other than ministers of God, whose love and understanding made the grace of God credible to me. 

How can we ever second guess God? Or know where the road of our life together takes unexpected turns? That night, in a small vestry, on my knees, saying yes to Jesus and to a different future. And beside me the man who was my first spiritual director, and the one who baptised me - and in due course, this young upstart would become a minister, and take the funeral service for him, and thirty years later for his wife. I look on these two people as amongst those whose faith in me has give substance and reality to what I believe about the generous and persistent love of God, who believes in us and redeems us to the depths of our being.

I thank my God for every remembrance of them......

 

Birmingham, Women Ministers and the liberty of Christ

Just been to Birmingham for a meeting with the Fellowship of British Baptists which met at the International Mission College of BMS World Mission. Baptist leaders from BUGB and Welsh and Scottish Unions meet each year to share ideas, stories and discuss together important aspects of strategy and development within our felloship of churches. It isn't an easy time to be a mainline denomination and there are fairly constant and demanding pressures of finance, cultural change, expectations both valid and unrealistic, and throughout it all a sense of urgency about how best to bear witness faithfully in our following after Christ.

Our visit coincided with Women in Ministry Day and I caught up very briefly with several friends including Carol, Ruth, Clare and Catriona - I met them in that order and had far too little time to talk about their ministries and how life was in the churches where they serve. But it did my heart no end of good to be amongst so many gifted and significant people whose ministries are expressed in creative faithfulness. I hope their time together was a time of mutual encouragement, shared expereince, renewed faith, replenished enthusiasm, and anything else that could in the generosity of God be given for their blessing and for the church's edicfication. The experience of women serving within a still male dominated leadership in our churches remains a pressing issue of justice, stewardship and fellowship, requiring biblical, theological and pastoral debate about the nature of the Gospel, the witness of a Gospel people, and the meaning of the liberty we have in Christ, and the liberty of Christ - to call to ministry those whom he calls. I've heard arguments for and against women in ministry - even to the point of stating what Christ can and cannot do as if the call of Christ has to answer to our theological scruples. At that point the issue becomes one of humility and obedience as key inner principles in any such responses, discussions and conclusions.

Then tonight watched the Champion's League Final - which Manchester United won. There are levels of emotional expenditure in football that come as close as anything else I've witnessed to relgious fervour - whether desolation or elation. I'm doing a paper later this summer on sport in general, and football in particular, as forms of secular spirituality. Tonight's game had some of the key elements of religiously generated expereince - prayer and cursing, praise and blame, fellowship and isolation, liturgical chants, and a sense of the absolute significance, even the cosmic implications of, THE RESULT. More on this later - time for bed.

Uncomfortable but comfortingly so?

A couple of years ago I read the commentary on Song of Solomon, in the New Interpreter's Bible. It is written by Renita Weems, an African American Pentecostal turned Methodist now married to a Baptist Pastor, and previously a Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University. The commentary is a wonderful corrective to those who approach the Song with all the inhibitions of Western culture, uncomfortable with the relationship between love, physicality and the human body. Written by a woman, taking seriously the sensuality and romance of these ancient love poems, the commentary is an unembarrassed affirmation of human love as God's good gift, nothing to be ashamed of but to be celebrated, enjoyed and wondered at in all its life-enhancing mystery. But more of this another time.

I've just read another of her books, Listening for God. a Minister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt. This is spirituality that is honest, self-inquisitive, unafraid to own up to the hard journey that is our walk with God - Who if always present, is seldom obviously so. Here and there Weems comes close to self-pity - but even that, if we are half as honest as Renita Weems, is an attitude most of us fall into, and as quickly deny. But most of the time she writes out of a hard won faith, and describes the inner landscape of uncertainty, of missed opportunities, disappointed hopes, hurts and wounds that have very long half-lives; and she does so with an at times desperate determination to hold God to account. How can any human hold God to account - well that depends on the God. A God who is faithful, constant, there but not obviously so, a Sovereign Creator whose mercy can at times seem severe, that Other whose purposes are hidden behind our most feared scenarios, and whose presence makes such scenarios survivable.

Here is just one excerpt, which can stand as a sample for the whole of this fine, brave and in the best sense en-couraging book:

But what if God's silence is not a ruse? What if God's silence is precisely the way God speaks....Silence can also be an invitation, an invitation to communicate without words, without thunder, without burning bushes. In an age addicted to words, when memos, faxes, Post-its, E-mail, announcements, flash bulletins, cell-phones and news make talk cheap and easy it is frustrating to be told we must not rely on words - direct speech that is. The burning bush was an invitation to be weaned off burning bushes, to come closer, to stay awahile, to learn idiosyncracies, to commune.

God speaks through burning bushes to get our attention so as never to have to speak again that way. Perhaps it's when we confuse God's intervention with God's intention that we set ourselves up for years of fist-raising questions...... (pages 198-99).

The whole book is uncomfortable reading, in a strangely comforting way.

Women, spirituality and (un)intentional obscurity

A  while ago I posted a couple of times on the relative absence of women in the biblical commentary industry. However I was able to muster a reasonable number of biblical commentaries written by women from the academically superb (Margaret Thrall on Second Corinthians, 2 volumes, International Critical Commentary), to the theologically and pastorally alert (Beverly Gaventa on Acts, Abingdon Biblical Ccommentary, and Kathleen O'Connor on Lamentations), to the devotionally evocative and spiritually penetrating (Joan Chittister on Ruth).

When it comes to asking which women have featured prominently in the development of the Christian Spiritual tradition I suspected a similar sense of absence, of cultural and traditional marginalisation. Yes - and no. The roll call of women whose lives and writings have influenced the ongoing Christian Spiritual Tradition has some impressive entries but is certainly not represented across all the traditions.

Macrina, sister of Gregory of Nyssa has until recently been on the margins. I still remember the great historian Jaroslav Pelikan in his Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, quietly dismantling centuries of prejudiced silence about this mother of the church, pointing out that to talk of the Church Fathers was to use vocabulary betraying either ignorance or chauvinism! Quite so - the Cappadocian "Fathers" owed a considerable intellectual debt to this woman - just as Appollos did to Priscilla.

Julian of Norwich - whatever we think of medieval mysticism, the cross centred, passionate theology so richly and profoundly explored in The Revelations of Divine Love, ranks with the finest atonement theology in the entire Christian tradition. Julian's theology is a medieval precursor of Moltmann's Crucified God (to my knowledge Moltmann has never significantly engaged with her work), and at times her writing soars to heights even Moltmann's rhetoric fails to reach.

From previous centuries also include Hildegard of Bingen,(the original 'feisty female' monastic), Teresa of Avila, (where is her reformation protestant equivalent?), Madame Guyon (French Quietist whose longing for God got her into trouble). The nineteenth century I might include Dora Greenwell, (whose theology P T Forsyth admired and learned from), Frances Havergal (poet, hymnwriter, hillwalker and milliner!).In the 20th century there are a few more women who were able to break through the glass ceiling - yes Evelyn Underhill, Amy Carmichael(doing some serious social stuff long before Mother Teresa), Florence Allshorn (community pioneer), Olive Wyon (translator of Emil Brunner!), Simone Weil (eccentric French philosopher, razor sharp mind, patron saint of those who struggle), Dorothy Sayers (translator of Dante, playwright and no mean theologian herself), Dorothy Day,( social activist, spirituality with the sleeeves rolled up), Mother Teresa; and in the past 25 years, Kathleen Norris, (poet and Benedictine oblate), Elaine Storkey ( evangelical feminist - yes it is possible), Joan Chittister (Benedictine, spiritual theologian)...but I'm struggling to make this a long impressive list. And be honest, how many of them have you read - how many have their works still in print - who has even heard of Olive Wyon, Florence Allshorn, Dora Greenwell??

And here's the Christian Blog equivalent of the pub quiz question with a bit of trivial pursuit obscurity thrown in -

name three women who have significantly impacted the development of the Scottish spiritual tradition, which is my current research area?

I will await your suggestions for other inclusions in the wider traditions; and ANY suggestion for women of obvious influence in the Scottish spiritual tradition. It isn't that they are not there - but who ever thought them important enough to write the biography, publish the writing, study the legacy, include them as essential players in the standard histories?

The infection of holiness

One of the sanest and at the same time sternest guides in the spiritual life was Evelyn Underhill, an Anglican lay woman, middle class, polite, leisured and literary, her photo portraying a not easily pleased headmistress - but a woman of deep perception, passionate honesty and gentle determination. Speaking with a friend yesterday we reminded each other how much Underhill's spirituality remains important as a corrective to our hard-nosed consumerist approaches to God that can at times seem like a series of shop till we drop expeditions of spiritual retail therapy. Here's a couple of her still needing to be pondered thoughts:

We talk and write easily about spiritual values and the spiritual life, but we remain fundamentally utilitarian, even pragamatic at heart. We want spiritual things to work, and the standard we apply is our miserable little notion of how they ought to work. We always want to know whether they are helpful. Our philosophy and religion are orientated, not towards the awful vision of that principle before which Isaiah saw the seraphim veil their eyes; but merely towards the visible life of humanity and its needs. We may speak respectfully of Mary and even study her psychology; but we feel that the really important thing is to encourage Martha to go on getting the lunch.

In the story of the rich young man, Underhill comments:

Jesus replies in effect.'Put aside all lesser interests, strip off unrealities, and come, give yourself the chance of catching the infection of holiness from Me'.

I'm going to say more about Evelyn Underhill on this blog - at times her terminology is dated, but her understanding of the spiritual life, her guidance in the search for God and holiness, represent endangered species of pastoral, ecclesial and theological skills.