Home

Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her father and mother. And then that thrilling quiet of which she had never felt any need to speak. Her father had always said, God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of the holy, so that we can feel and know the presence of the Lord, who is always with us. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence.

Marilynne Robinson, Home (Virago Press, 2009), p115

Home and Gilead, such lucid writing and such loving, careful attention to the characters. The beauty is in their flaws and failures, and the graces hidden and revealed.

The Words of God

A certain Philosopher asked St Anthony: Father, how can you be so happy when you are deprived of the consolation of books? Anthony replied: My book, O philosopher, is the nature of created things, and any time I want to read the words of God, the book is before me.

Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert (1961) CIII

CofE

Confronted by the wistful, the half-believing and the seeking, we know what it is to minister to those who relate to the faith of Christ in unexpected ways. We do not write off hesitant and inadequate responses to the gospel. Ours is a church of the smoking flax, of the mixture of wheat and tares. Critics may say that we blunt the edge of the gospel and become Laodicean. We reply that we do not despise the hesitant and half-believing, because the deeper we look into human lives the more often we discern the glowing embers of faith.

Robert Runcie, 'Comment', Church Observer, June 1962, quoted by Martyn Percy in ed. Bell, Hopkinson, Willmott, Reshaping Rural Ministry – A Theological and Practical Handbook, p151

Easter

Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,
More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,
Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,
Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wreck of the Deutschland, lines 277-280

Seven Last Words

Love and worth

As far as Julian is concerned, feelings of guilt and worthlessness are far more serious than the moral failures which are usually called sins. Partly this is because unresolved feelings of these sorts prevent us from living in the joy and freedom of God's loving presence. Partly also it is because they represent unhealed fracturing and pain at the core of the personality. The result of such pain will inevitably be pain-behaviour, actions arising out of the depths of our wounded psyche which only serve to deepen the hurts even further, and in the process hurt others as well. Indeed it is from this source that sins in the sense of moral failures usually arise. If the deep wounds are cured, the sins which are symptomatic and expressive of them need no longer occur.

The deep sense of worthlessness, like our blindness to the love of God, can already be healed in part, though in part it still waits for consummation. The face of God is seen by Julian as the face of the compassionate Christ; and his face is our face. Looking on Jesus Julian sees the dignity and value of humankind demonstrated in his humanity. If once it is fully accepted that Jesus was truly man, then it is no longer possible to despise human nature, because Jesus is the manifestation of what that nature truly is. … Contemplation of Christ enlightens us so that we are able to see the worth of our own selves in the love and delight which God has for us.

Grace M Jantzen, Julian of Norwich – Mystic and Theologian (SPCK, 1987) p208

Not enough, but not nothing

As I write these notes, my wife is lying on the settee at the other end of the room, to safeguard against her getting pressure sores. She has multiple sclerosis. Twenty years ago, she worked as a psychiatrist. Just last week we had a Christmas card from one of her psychotherapy patients, who remembers the sessions she had with Ann and looks back on them as a decisive shaping influence on her life. Today Ann cannot remember what country she lives in, nor what day it is, nor what are the names of the two carers who have shared in looking after her for over two years, nor what is the name of the grandson who brought her such joy when he was here a few weeks ago. She is virtually unable to swallow (she eats via a feeding tube) or to speak. She is watching the television news, though I am not sure how much she takes in. On that news we have been hearing of the terrible cost of the Russian invasion of Chechnya, of the suffering of the local people and of the Russian bodies surrounding their tanks. The pictures were too grim to show us. In a moment I will take her out for a walk in her wheelchair in the warm January sun, and we will have an ice-cream, and if we are lucky she will be able to eat a little of it, and as I push her back up the hill to our apartment I will sing silly songs and pretend I am not going to make it to the top, and she will laugh. It is not enough, but it is not nothing, and it is certainly not to be despised. It is a gift from God. That is what Ecclesiastes says. It is also a wonderful gift from God that this book should be in the canon of scripture. I cannot imagine how it got through some community screening procedure. Actually I can. I do not think they were fooled by the reference to Solomon. I think they were overcome by the truth it speaks.

John Goldingay, David Allan Hubbard Professor of Old Testament
at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, in BRF Guidelines Jan-Apr 2001, Ecclesiastes