We should refuse to be intimidated by anything of whatever source.  The world has in a sense always been a foreign country. We are strangers and pilgrims seeking the City of God.

Consider Abraham.

8 By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. (Hebrews 11:8-11)

Consider the Jews going into exile in Babylon in 597 BC  under King Nebuchadnezzar. He levelled the Temple and the City of Jerusalem. Psalm 137 expresses the sorrow of the Jews in Babylon as they wept by the Waters of Babylon and wept when they remembered Jerusalem.

The River Euphrates flowing through the Desert.

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

    when we remembered Zion.

2 There on the poplars

    we hung our harps,

3 for there our captors asked us for songs,

    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

    they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

4 How can we sing the songs of the Lord

    while in a foreign land? (Psalm 137)

Psalm 137 was written by one of the Exiles in Babylon during the Captivity. Jerusalem and the Temple had been destroyed and the Children of Israel taken into bondage. It was a time of mourning and regret.

It was an unknown prophet, who we call Second Isaiah, that in the name of the God of Israel told the exiles that they must sing a New Song.  Second Isaiah opens with those wonderful words – “Comfort ye, O comfort ye my people,” Says your God.’ Those words  from Isaiah 40:1 were the inspiration behind Handel’s  Oratorio, “The Messiah.”

The exiles in Babylon inspired by Isaiah’s God did indeed sing a new song, We likewise are living in a world that is indifferent to the God of Israel.  We too are bidden by Isaiah to sing the Lord’s song in a strange Land.

Many ancient texts in Holy Scripture explode with fresh power in our contemporary world.

The God inspired poem by Second Isaiah was originally directed to the exiles in Babylon. It was then a message of hope and encouragement sent by God. Likewise it is for us to-day.

Let us in our day sing the Lord’s Song as Isaiah urges. It is our God given duty and right. It is only by singing the Lord’s Song that we can counteract the dark powers that threaten all life on this planet. King David sang and danced before the Ark of the Covenant.

 

10 Sing to the Lord a new song, says Isaiah. (See chapter 42 of Isaiah)

    Let the people sing for joy;

    let them shout from the mountaintops.

12 Let them give glory to the Lord

    and proclaim his praise in the islands.

16 I will lead the blind by ways they have not known,

    along unfamiliar paths I will guide them;

I will turn the darkness into light before them

  and make the rough places smooth.

These are the things I will do;

    I will not forsake them.

The entire Chapter 42 of Second Isaiah is as relevant for us o-day as it was for those to whom it was written. Can we imagine the Prophet Isaiah defying the Babylonian Empire, and singing this song in defiance of the rulers and army of Ancient Babylon?

This prophecy/poem was composed by Isaiah in opposition to the authorities, encouraging hope and a return to Israel. Living in hope opens God’s Grace in our fallen world.

Think of it: new reality conjured in worship, by the choir, inviting to new courage, new faith, new energy, new obedience and new joy. Isaiah’s song is as subversive as is the New Reality that is dawning.

The New Song never describes the world as it is now. The New Song imagines how the world will be in God’s good time to come.  We must look to the future with hope.

We ought to spend much more of our energy promoting the God of Israel. Our vocation is to proclaim the true God as manifested in Christ Jesus. We may have to sing the Lord’s Song in a land that has become increasingly dominated by Militant Islam. But sing the Lord’s Song we must with unceasing fervour like King David when he sang and danced before the Ark of the Covenant.

The New Song is a refusal to accept the world as it is, a refusal to believe that present circumstances are right or will last. Singing a new Song to the Lord is a constant theme in the Psalms. Psalm 33: 3 – Sing unto the Lord a new song

Particularly relevant is Psalm 40: 3 – “And he put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.”  As Christians we must NOT be defeatist or discouraged. Heads held high. The Lord will give us the words of HIS SONG. Jesus is Lord.

The New Testament proclaims that at some unforeseeable time in the future, God will ring down the final curtain on history, and there will come a Day on which all our days and all the judgements upon each other will themselves be judged.

The judge will be Christ. In other words, the one who judges us most finally will be the one who loves us most fully.

Romantic love is blind to everything except what is lovable and lovely, but Christ’s love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything that diminishes our joy. The worse sentence that love can pass is that we behold the suffering which love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.

ECCE HOMO painting by Caravaggio.

God of past, present and future, be with us as we journey through these uncertain times. May we learn to relinquish our old habits so that we are ready to receive your newness. In our exile we look for you, O God.Teach us your new song and celebrate your faithfulness. And the new life that you are ever bringing into being, Amen

Lippi’s Annunciation. You can just make out the Holy spirit moving towards Mary’s womb.

It is only by studying the Old Testament book of Exodus and the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews in depth  are we able to fully comprehend the miracle of the Incarnation that took place in the Virgin Mary.

I remember our Old Testament Professor, himself a converted Jew and now an Anglican priest impressing upon us that the Incarnation could only be fully understood by viewing it within the Book of Exodus. The New Covenant is in the Womb of the Old Covenant.

God instructed Moses to build a tabernacle surrounded by heavy curtains ( Ex 25-27). Within the tabernacle he was to place an ark made of acacia wood covered with gold inside and out. Within the Ark of the Covenant was placed a golden jar holding the manna, Aaron’s rod that budded, and the stone tablets of the covenant (Heb 9:4).

When the ark was finally completed, the glory cloud of the Lord covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle (Ex 40:34-35; Num  9:18, 22).

The verb for “to cover” or “to overshadow” and the metaphor of a cloud are used in Holy Scripture to signify the presence and glory of God. Another word for glory is shekinah.

The word shekinah does not appear in the Bible, but the concept clearly does. The Jewish rabbis coined this extra-biblical expression, a form of a Hebrew word that literally means “he caused to dwell,” signifying that it was a divine visitation of the presence or dwelling of the Lord God on this earth.  Applied to Our Lady the “causing to dwell” is extraordinarily relevant.

In the theophanies of the Old Testament, the cloud, simultaneously hidden and revealed manifests the living and saving God, while hiding the transcendence of his glory. This continually occurs  with Moses on Mount Sinai, at the tent of meeting, and during the Wilderness wanderings  and with King Solomon at the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem.

Through the Holy Spirit’s fiat  Jesus Christ fulfills these figurative images. . The Spirit comes upon the Virgin Mary and “overshadows” her, so that she might conceive and give birth to Jesus. The parallels with the Ark of the Covenant are too great to be dismissed.

On the Mountain of Transfiguration, the Spirit in the “cloud came and overshadowed” Jesus, Moses and Elijah, Peter, James and John, and  “a voice came out of the cloud, saying, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’” Finally, the cloud took Jesus out of the sight of the disciples on the day of his Ascension and will reveal him as Son of Man in glory on the day of his final coming. The glory of the Lord “overshadowed” the ark and filled the tabernacle.

It’s easy to ignore the parallel between the Holy Spirit overshadowing the ark and the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary, between the Ark of the Old Covenant as the dwelling place of God and Mary as the new dwelling place of God.

God was very specific about every exact detail of the ark (Ex 25-30). It was a place where God himself would dwell (Ex 25:8). God wanted his words—written  on stone tablets—housed in a perfect container covered with pure gold within and without.

How much more would he want his Word—Jesus—to have a perfect dwelling place!  The Sanctified Womb of the Virgin Mary is just that.

The Virgin Mary is the living shrine of the Word of God, the Ark of the New and Eternal Covenant.

St. Luke’s narrative  of the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary beautifully incorporates the images of the tent of meeting with God in Sinai and of the temple of Zion. Just as the cloud covered the people of God marching in the desert ,  (Num 10:34; Deut 33:12; Ps 91:4) and just as the same cloud, as a sign of the divine mystery present in the midst of Israel, hovered over the Ark of the Covenant (.Ex 40:35), so now the shadow of the Most High and Holy One surrounds and  infiltrates the Tabernacle of the New Covenant that is the womb of Mary. (St Luke 1: 35.

“And the angel answered and said to her,  “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy offspring shall be called the Son of God.

The Son-ship of Jesus is achieved by the overshadowing and penetration of Mary’s womb  by the Holy Spirit. The full import of this is seen in the Transfiguration of Jesus talking to Moses and Elijah on the Holy Mountain.

For the ancients, the future was always to be a re-play of the past, as the past was simply an earthly  replay of the drama of the heavens. That history repeats itself is false history.

HISTORY IS ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW.

The great gift of the Jews is that history is always something new, a process unfolding through time whose direction and end we cannot know, except, in so far God gives us some hint as what is to come.

Those wonderful words In Second Isaiah are as true and real for to-day as they were five hundred years ago

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness,  and rivers in the desert. (Isaish 49:13)

The future will not be what has happened before; indeed the only reality that the future has is that it has not happened yet. It is unknowable, and what it will be cannot be discovered by fortune-telling, astrology or palmistry. The Romans used to try and predict the result of future events by auguries such as reading the stars or examining entrails of sacrificial animals.

Time ever flows forward. Clocks are merely a help in determining our day to day living.

We do not have any power over the future. In a profound sense even God does not control the future,. because it is the collective responsibility of those who are bringing about the future by their actions in the present. For this reason the concept of the future holds out promise rather than just the same old thing . We are not doomed, not bound to some predetermined fate: we are free.

If anything can happen, we are truly liberated from past time – as liberated as were the Israelite Slaves when they crossed the Sea of Reeds.(Red Sea)

This wonderful new sense of time did not descend upon the Israelites all at once. What began as the call of Abraham to leave his place and people and set out for an unknown destiny blossomed into the vocation of Moses to lead his enslaved people out of the god-haunted ambiance of cyclical time of Egypt, where everything that would be had already been and all important questions had been answered, already set in stone, like the staring immobile statues of Pharaoh.

Through the Ancient Israelites  we have gone from the personal destiny of Abraham to the corporate destiny of the People of Israel. We have gone from a household god, that one carries along for good luck, to YHWH the God of gods whose power is mightier even than the mightiest power on earth can summon, because it is the power of love.

Behold I make all things New.

The photo above is of the stone circle at Boscawen Un on the way to Land’s End. It’s four thousand years old and for me a holy place. The interpretation of these sites is in a continual state of flux, because no one knows for certainty what actually happened here.  They were most likely ceremonial centres connected with the winter and summer solstices, the seasons, as well as with birth and death. Here where I live in Cornwall, I’ve been surrounded by these ancient sites for  as long as I remember. There’s little doubt that they have left a profound influence on my life both as a lad and subsequently. Most of our Cornish Churches are built on old pagan sites where the ancient gods such as the Earth Mother were worshipped. Cornwall has many links with Ancient India.

Seen against the sky the effect is impressive. The Celtic Tribes who erected these monoliths might have been pagan, but God is not without witness in any age. There are more stone circles and ancient sites in Cornwall than anywhere else in the British Isles, and that includes Wales and Ireland.

Standing stones are another feature of our prehistoric past. Possibly these were to anchor the souls of the dead and stop them from bothering the living. There are large numbers of them around here. There is one just behind my bungalow.

I visit Boscawen Un two or three times a year, and such visits always refresh and spiritually recharge me.  Boscawen Un, (pronounced noon), in common with other stone circles in Cornwall are “thin places,” where heaven and earth meet. That they may be pagan sites in no way diminishes their sacred nature. God, however he may be named, transcends all the concepts and ideas that we associate with the deity. It’s enlightening to realize that our Bronze Age ancestors buried their dead in Barrow Graves with articles such as pottery, implements and weapons for a future life. They certainly rejected the idea  that death was the end.

Barrow Grave near St Buryan. (Penzance)

The photo below at Chun Quoit near Land’s End, has had the earth removed from around it. The cremated remains of several people would have been buried in these tombs.

One of the major festivals of the Celtic year was Samhain, celebrated on 31^st October and extending into the first week of November. All Hallows, Hallowe’en and All Saints are familiar to us because the Church in her wisdom baptized all the old pagan feasts and gave them new meaning as Christian Feasts. The rituals of Samhain were concerned with the dead and the spirits of the ancestors. All Saints and All Souls have ancient origins in our Pagan past.

St Buryan Stone Circle and one of the easiest to find. Its just off the main road to Porthcurno and the Minack Theatre.

It was up this estuary of the River Hayle that the Saints came with the Gospel to West Cornwall.  The little Church in the far distance is St Uny who came here from Ireland.

 

All the photos are my own taken at various times over the years.

The descendants of the Ancient Pagans who originally constructed the Circles gladly received the Gospel when the Monks from Asia Minor came to these shores with the GOOD News.

As an Anglican I accept what Article IX says concerning Original Sin. However the two Genesis accounts of creation are  Middle Eastern and  Semitic  approaches to understanding the world. Adam and Eve are representative of humankind as we find ourselves in God’s creation. In a sense we are all Adam and Eve and in need of redemption by Christ. In the words of St Paul – “ for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23.)

“Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk;) but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the Spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation. And this infection of nature doth remain, yea in them that are regenerated; whereby the lust of the flesh, called in Greek phronema sarkos (which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh), is not subject to the Law of God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized; yet the Apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin.”

The language is somewhat quaint, but the thrust of it is clear. I’ve always assumed that the Roman Catholic Church more or less believes the same.

The word “infection” is especially relevant – “And this infection of nature doth remain.”

We are fallen creatures. Nature is red hot in tooth and claw and that includes us.” Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is as relevant for to-day as when it was written by him. Paul begins with Christ and what God has done for us in Christ.

In the Greek Orthodox Church’s  Faith, the term “original sin” refers to the “first” sin of Adam and Eve. As a result of this sin, humanity bears the “consequences” of sin, the chief of which is death. Here the word “original” may be seen as synonymous with “first.” Hence, the “original sin” refers to the “first sin” in much the same way as “original chair” refers to the “first chair.”

In the West, humanity likewise bears the “consequences” of the “original sin” of Adam and Eve. However, the West also understands that humanity is likewise “guilty” of the sin of Adam and Eve. The term “Original Sin” here refers to the condition into which humanity is born, a condition in which guilt as well as consequence is involved.

In the Orthodox Christian understanding, while humanity does bear the consequences of the original, or first, sin, humanity does not bear the personal guilt associated with this sin. Adam and Eve are guilty of their willful action; we bear the consequences, chief of which is death.

While the Orthodox Church does accord Augustine of Hippo the title “saint” and recognizes the vast number of theological works he produced, Augustine was not as well known in the Christian East. His works were not translated into Greek until the 14th century; as such, he had little or no influence on mainstream Orthodox thought until 17th century.

It would be interesting to know the views of Lutherans and Calvinists believe.

Baptists and many other Evangelical Churches do not believe in infant baptism.

I have visited Assisi twice and each time been overwhelmed by the spirit of the little town. On both occasions I was the chaplain to an Anglican group and was able to celebrate the Eucharist in one of the many chapels of the Basilica. If you’ve never been, believe me, It is an experience you will never forget.

The walk down to the Church of San Damiano has a spiritual presence that is almost palpable. On several occasions I was able to be alone and meditate along the way.

It was interesting talking to the other pilgrims who were in the group. On each time were were thirty of us. The joy of pilgrimage is being with others and sharing one another’s experience of  God’s grace in our lives. Initially we met up at Gatwick and our English reserve was much in evidence. Gradually it began to melt and we found ourselves blending into a corporate unit. We were not all committed believers. Three  came out of curiosity. One lovely man came up to me and expressed his scepticism about God. We had several quite long conversations and I sensed that he was undergoing a battle within himself. On one  occasion I found Jim  standing alone gazing up at this crucifix in the Church of San Damiano. He didn’t see me, and I quietly left leaving him to his thoughts. We didn’t get a chance to speak again,  but I’d hazard a guess that the Lord Jesus had embraced him. The grace of God has unexpected ways into the soul’s sanctuary that is beyond our comprehension.

This is the crucifix and it radiated a healing power which remains with me to this day. Its not a good photograph because of the dim light in the chapel. But it is so life like and somehow penetrates one’s inner soul with grace. Crucifixes have always meant much to me but this one in particular. The photo below is of San Damiano.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offense, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.
O Master, let me not seek as much
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.

Franciscan Chapel of the Anglican Friary in Hilfield Dorset.

Samson is an interesting  character in the Old Testament. (Judges, chapters 13-16.) We can learn much about ourselves through it. The drama has many implications for us,  but the conclusion lies far beyond the Old Testament narrative.

Samson’s story is a powerful saga about a man who was NOT the brave leader commonly supposed by the average person. The book of Judges presents him as a man who was given to whoring and sexual exploits.  The Bible is littered with characters that are seriously flawed.   King Saul, King David and his son Solomon were far from perfect. Samson could be said to head the list.

“Samson the hero,” is what every Jewish child the first time he or she hears about him. Over the years that is how he has been portrayed in works of art, theatre and film. Saint Saens composed an impressive opera about him, the music of which captures the pathos of his lonely existence. Grand Opera is a wonderful media for portraying loss and tragedy. All the best operas end with a death. Think of Madame Butterfly in the opera by Puccini.

Verdi’s opera based on Shakespeare’s Othello adds considerably to the tragedy of the story. Othello you will remember kills Desdemona, his lover, out of rumour and misplaced jealousy.

Samson was a man whose calling was a never ending struggle to accommodate his life  to the powerful destiny thrust upon him. That is true of all Christians.  We are all flawed. How otherwise can we understand others?

Samson couldn’t grasp the tragic role into which he had been cast. He’s a very fragmented individual. He was born a stranger to his parents. Despite being the strongman of popular myth, he constantly yearned to win the affections of his father and mother and love in general. The whole of his existence was the quest for love that he was never to know.

There are few other Bible stories with so much passion, action, fireworks and raw emotion. The battle with the lion, the three hundred burning foxes, the women he bedded and the one woman that he loved, are intensely dramatic. His betrayal by the women in his life, from his mother to Delilah, and in the end his murderous suicide, when he brought the house down on himself and three thousand Philistines, are not calculated to give comfort or hope. The lesson of Samson’s story is what the Spirit communicates to us through it.

Beyond the untamed wildness, impulsiveness, the chaos and the din, we sense a life story that is at bottom the tortured journey of a single, lonely and turbulent soul who never found anywhere a true home in the world. His very body was a harsh place of exile.  This discovery, call it recognition, which like all tragic stories,  slips silently into the day to day existence of each of us, into our most private moments, and our buried secrets.  There’s a little bit of Samson in every one of us, hopefully without such drastic results.

Now the conclusion – Only the Lord Jesus can give us the love for which we have been created and only He can heal our conflicts and lead us into the present reality of his Kingdom.  Jesus is as much for Now as any future life that might exist beyond the grave.

I don’t say that Jesus solves all our problems. But he does help us live with them

“And so I have often said , – The shell must be cracked apart, if what is in it is to come out; for if you want the kernel you must break the shell. (Meister Eckhart in his German Sermon “Hanc Dicit Dominus.” 

Many  thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin were not fearful of breaking the shell to get at the kernel. In all probability what’s inside, if creative enough, will emerge by itself.

As Fr Teilhard has said a number of times. – “In all things there is a Within, coextensive with their Without.”

“Deep within ourselves we can discern, as through a rent an “interior” at the heart of things; and this glimpse is sufficient to force upon us the conviction that this “interior” exists and has always existed everywhere in nature…the stuff of the universe has an inner face that is in its very structure.” (Fr Teilhard.)

I find that very helpful in thinking about the immensity of the Cosmos in relation to ourselves.

Fr Teilhard de Chardin was an outsider, not a heretic as some posters on this forum would have us believe. Many of the most creative thinkers have been outsiders. One of the classic outsiders was Charles Darwin whose “Origin of Species” caused an uproar in Victorian Britain. Yet to-day we have learned not only to live with his researches but also to accommodate them within the wider Christian perspective.

With the advent of powerful radio telescopes and even more  complicated means such as the Hubble space craft we know that our universe is immense.

This high-resolution image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field  includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, are some of the most distant galaxies to have been imaged by an optical telescope.

It was upon the “Physics” of the Universe that Fr Teilhard built up his mysticism. He envisioned the whole of evolution being reduced to a process of union with God, becoming in its totality, loving and lovable in the innermost and most ultimate of its developments.

Fr Teilhard died long before the Hubble Telescope began to explore the deepest reaches of outerspace, but his vision is as real for to-day as it was in the last century.

He writes – “I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the ALL which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old  as the beginning of thought. The Cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars. And since then we find evidence of it in all the experience of the great and unbounded: in art, in poetry, in religion. Though it we react to the world “as a whole” as with our eyes to light. “

My cat likes to go out at night. I look out of my bedroom window and there he is sitting on the lawn looking up at the stars. I go out, and on  seeing me he springs up into my arms and cuddles up against me.

Pope Francis is possibly the Catholic Church’s most valuable asset.

Pope Francis in 2015  visited the United States. This was a momentous and earth shaking  event that has left many lives changed.  This included the then current United States House of Representative Speaker John Boehner.

What is it about this man that is so contagious? Is it his genuineness? His beautiful selfless acts of compassion (like kissing the feet of Aid victims and allowing the children to come near him)? Is it his humour? It could be all of this and more. It is because of his God given Compassion and the action of the Holy Spirit in his life. Thank God for him.

The truth is that Pope Francis is one of the most interesting individuals on our planet  today. He could even be one of the most fascinating and attractive  Popes ever! Facts about Pope Francis may confirm this statement. For example, did you know that his Holiness studied philosophy at the Catholic University of Buenos Aires and also has a master’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires? It’s a fact. He has a brilliant brain and can speak the language of science.

How about the fact that Pope Francis is the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere and the first non-European pope since the Syrian Gregory III in 741. Probably one of  folk’s favourite facts is that  he worked as a bouncer in a Buenos Aries bar to help pay for his studies (in other words, don’t mess with this pope.)

Pope Francis is a people’s Pope and he slowly going to change the entire face of the Roman Catholic Church. He’s a people person. Things in the Catholic Church will never be the same again.

Pope Francis’ dialogue with Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was a momentous advance in ecumenical relationships.That they were both as Bishops of the Church to meet and share fellowship was wonderful. It was a real joy to see them standing together in this photo.

Now he’s going to visit Egypt. Whatever we may think of Islam, the Pope is prepared to hold out the hand of friendship to Muslims.

May the Lord protect him and bless his Papacy,  God’s Man for this 21st Century. He’s a Jesus Man. Alleluia.

Theology which includes philosophy and dogma as well as a variety of other disciplines is akin to poetry. Neither poetry or theology are easy flowing rivers. Both are fountains from which meaning can be slowly drawn. No two individuals are the same and different ideas or ways of thinking suit different people. Psychology plays an important role in all this. poetry and theology require creative and sustained reading. There is rarely any quick clarity in any discipline that is worth effort and time to assimilate.

Get a group of people together talking about any subject and you’ll discover very quickly that there are no easy answers.

When I was an undergraduate I took the study of John’s Gospel in Koine Greek  as my special subject. It wasn’t too long before I had to cope with views and ideas that seemed to be totally at odds with each other. All seemed to be right and all seemed to be wrong. One had to pick and choose and come to a conclusion. I found Raymond E. Brown’s commentaries on St John to be the most intelligent and meaningful. I still do and his new introduction to the Gospel of John published after his death and completed by Fr Francis J.Moloney is superb. (Fr Raymond Brown died in 1998.) The new introduction was published in 2003.

The entire Bible is closer to poetry than newspaper speak. Theology is much the same. There is no one meaning in any theological debate among a group of Christians. We don’t live in a world to-day where we can claim infallible authority for anything. Every text is filtered through the eyes of the reader, ( the ears of the listener)

As Marilynne Robinson has written in her novel Gilead, “nothing  true can be said about God  from a posture of defence”. We all know how biblical and theological bullets can be fired in debates to score against the enemy. Such vaporized readings and dogmatic utterances will never win souls.

The ultra dogmatic approach to faith fails to recognize something else – that from its very beginnings the human intuition that the world is a gift, that it has a divine origin,  and that life and love come from this same source, was explored and shared poetically. No other language could possibly begin to do justice to the inspiring, daunting mysteries of reality itself. The Book of Genesis is the classic example of imaginative and poetic inspiration that says as much about its authors, (J.E.D&P) as of course “God.”

Ever since priests and peoples of the world’s religions have been aware of the numinous they have opened their arms to invoke the name of God and have done so in poetic scriptures pouring from their lips and dramatized into movement and liturgy. It is also striking that the Holy Texts of the world’s religions, believed by many to be revealed by God as holy wisdom from beyond the human mind,  are often found in poetic form. It is acknowledged by the world’s religious devotees that God is very clearly a poet.

After the seas are all cross’d, (as they seem already cross’d,)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.

(Walt Whitman)

Quoted in Walter Brueggemann’s Finally comes the poet – Daring Speech for Proclomation. (Brueggmannn is Old Testament Professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, Atlanta.