Still Quarrying: I Don't Like Wednesdays!

It’s very much an oldie now but you still hear people humming, whistling, mumbling the Boomtown Rats song: ‘I Don’t Like Mondays.’  Bob Geldof wrote it after hearing about a shooting in an elementary school in San Diego USA.  A sixteen-year-old woman, Brenda Anne Spencer, fired at children in the school playground killing two adults and injuring eight children and one police officer.   Her explanation for her crime was: ‘I don’t like Mondays.  This livens up the day.’  

 

No one would want to endorse such an extreme and horrific reaction but if we take the title of the song, it captures what many of us feel.  That’s why people still hum it, whistle it, and mumble it.    After a pleasant weekend it’s back to work, school, college and sometimes that involves a big psychological push.  For me, Monday is the day when I receive chemotherapy at the Beatson which also involves taking steroids.  I’m left a bit wobbly and that continues into Tuesday.  It’s on Wednesday that I experience the crash.  I’m told it has to do with the steroids.  They give you a bit of a lift and then let you down, sometimes quite dramatically.   So, for me it’s not Mondays that are the problem, it’s Wednesdays.  I don’t like them.  

 

It's not easy to describe what it’s like.  The nearest I can get to it is ‘Space Dust’.  If you are of my generation, you may remember it from the penny tray in the sweetie shop.  You could say it was a more dynamic version of sherbet.  When it went into your mouth it sparked and fizzed and bubbled, and all in all it was good fun.  The more exhibitionist among us kept our mouths open when the sparking and fizzing and bubbling was going on.  Well, it’s good to share the best of yourself.  Wednesday is like having Space Dust sprinkled on my brain and it’s not such good fun.  You feel you are not part of this world, you slow down, concentration is low, you sometimes have to think carefully before you speak.  

 

I don’t like Wednesdays, but they are opportunities to focus on Paul’s vision of contentment:

 

‘ . . . I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.  I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty.  I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.  I can do all this through him who gives me strength.’  (Philippians 4: 11-13).’  

 

So how do we take this forward?  It’s not just about relaxation techniques and trying to be calm.  It’s not just about gritting your teeth and being determined that you will not be overwhelmed by this experience.  It’s not even about focussing on your favourite Bible verses – although of the three options opened up here that is obviously the best.  What is needed is the conviction that no matter how you may feel the God revealed in the Scriptures and supremely in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is present in the midst of the Space Dust.  It’s a challenge.  But to say anything else is to say there are some areas of life that God has abandoned.  That there are some areas of life that are too dark, too painful, too perplexing for Him to dwell in.  

 

A seventeenth century frier Brother Lawrence wrote a devotional book called The Practice Of The Presence Of God which has at its heart the conviction that we are never out of the presence of God whether engaged in the most menial tasks or struggling to make sense of the darkest circumstances.  God is present.  Nothing will ever separate us from His love.  His good purpose for His people will never be sabotaged by the worst of times.  We need to pray out of this conviction even when it doesn’t feel true.

 

Many years ago, a friend of mine told me that he wasn’t convinced that you can pray anywhere and at any time.  You need time set apart, and a special place.   Certainly, you can point to Jesus and His frequent ‘drawing apart’, to be alone with His heavenly Father.  But He also prayed on the cross when He no longer felt the presence of God and considered Himself abandoned.  He continued to practice the Presence when to paraphrase the hymn he felt the Father had turned His face away.  

 

It is this perseverance with the God revealed to us in Scripture and in the life and ministry of Jesus that opens us up to the strength experienced by Paul and leads us to that contentment that can be hours even in the days we don’t like.  

Still Quarrying: 'The Perfect Golden Circle.'

 It’s always good to discover new writers and even more so when they have something to offer.  This one came with no personal recommendation but was a pick-up in the local library.  It was the unusual story that grabbed me.  In 1989 England two friends set out in a rundown campervan to create crop-circles, so intricate that they are soon attracting not merely national but international attention.  

 

Along the way the connection with mankind and the ‘land’ is explored along with commercialisation, the power of money and status, the mystery and power of art.  Sounds a bit heavy when I put it down like that, but the writing has a light touch, and the most engaging aspect of the book is the two main characters Calvert and Redbone.  

 

Calvert is an ex-SAS Falklands veteran and is carrying many traumatic experiences.  It is never stated but regular flashbacks would indicate Post-            Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  For him the creation of crop circles - the organisation, the purpose, the achievement - is therapy.  

 

Redbone is an aging punk band member who receives mystical visions and has a strong connection to the ‘land’, to the ancient people who lived on it and the wisdom that guided them.  He lives in a campervan.  

 

An unlikely couple.  We never learn how they met but there is a deep friendship which in the main does not require too much conversation to survive the demands of their work and their sometime disappointments and setbacks.  Not much good stuff is written about male-friendship but this falls into that category. 

 

It’s difficult to go into the plot too much. I’m sensitive to throwing out too many ‘spoilers'. But along the way there are challenges human, technological and personal that threaten to throw them off course.  At one point Calvert and Redbone have a discussion about ‘the perfect golden circle’.  Redbone doubts it could ever exist: ‘I don’t believe anything man-made can ever be perfect.'  Even if a machine is employed to make the perfect golden circle will incorporate man’s imperfection at some level.  In the end Redbone concedes, reluctantly, that the perfect golden circle still exists in our minds.  And it is this which in the end drives forward their Great Project.  

 

In there is an acknowledgement in the two men that they are being driven by ‘something’ outside themselves.  Redbone is influenced by Buddhist and Hindu thought, Calvert driven by the power of ‘truth and beauty.’  How it all works out in the end is deeply moving. And reminds Christians that there many discussions out there with broken but commendable people in which to engage. 

Still Quarrying: From Pulpit To Pew.

 In retirement there have been new things to get used to.  House, community, relationships.  Chief among the new things for me, however, is my role in the Church,  not leading from the front on the Lord’s Day but sitting in a pew.  This I have been doing now for the last eight months.  It hasn’t been as great a challenge as you might think.  Our parish Church, ten minutes’ walk away, is blessed by a warm, welcoming congregation and a minister who is committed to the preached Word.  Still, I have missed the preparation for preaching and the privilege of delivering it to God’s people.  My continuing cancer treatment can leave me debilitated in body and mind and just not fit to engage with the task of preaching at the previous level.    But it would be odd indeed to see that diminish from your life and not feel the difference.   Paul tried to imagine what it would be like not to preach.  He cried:

 

‘ . . . when I preach the gospel I cannot boast, since I am compelled to preach.  Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel.’  (I Corinthians 9: 16). 

 

The circumstances are different but at the heart of these words is a realisation that the task of preaching is part of Paul’s very being, that he has been commissioned by God to deliver the Gospel, and not to do so leaves him unfulfilled and, indeed, under judgement.   This is a realisation that every preacher shares with the apostle and it is not easy to face the fact that preaching is no longer as central to your life as it once was.  

 

But this leads me to reflect on something that Eric Alexander once wrote:  

 

‘The man I am is more important to God than the work I do.  The secret of failure is often failure in secret.  Resist professionalism in the ministry: be yourself.’  

 

I may state that preaching is a priority, a privilege, and the great fulfilment of my life but my life being completely open to God,  what is God’s supreme purpose with me?  It is to see Christ reflected in my life.  And perhaps that is the great lesson of these pew-filling years.  No longer having the status of ‘the minister’ delivering the Word, what impact is the preached Word having on my life?

 

Confession time.  There are passages in Scripture that when I come across them in my personal devotions something within me says: ‘Not this again!’  We’ve been over this time and time again and is there anything else to be squeezed out of it?  The Parable of the Sower is an example.  But there is a sense that there is no more important passage in the whole of the Gospels.  The fact that it appears in Matthew, Mark and Luke would seem to underline this.  And the strange thing is that at the heart of this story is how much is wasted in the preaching of the Gospel.  We are told about a farmer who sows seed which falls on a path, among rocks and in competition with weeds.  Only a percentage falls among ‘good soil’ and yields a crop.   What we normally miss is what Jesus says in in Luke 8: 16-18 after he has told the story:

 

'No one lights a lamp and hides it in a clay jar or puts it under a bed.  Instead, they put it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light.  For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.  Therefore consider carefully how you listen.  Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have , even what they think they have will be taken from them.'  

We live open lives before God.  Nothing is hidden.  So how do we look?  That’s the challenge and Jesus warns us that the key to spiritual growth is to heed the call ‘to consider carefully how we listen.’   It is important to hear and understand but it doesn’t stop there.  How much that we hear is applied to out lives and becomes part of our spiritual DNA?  Jesus unpacks the ‘good soil’:

 

‘ . . . the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.’  (Luke 8: 15.)

 

If this sounds like a dig at those who fill the pews, remember I am one of them now!  Moreover, while we listeners have a responsibility as we leave Church on the Lord’s Day to consider how we will respond to the preached Word, spare a prayer for those who have been preparing for preaching and tasked with delivering it to God’s people.  They have been ‘listening’ with mind and heart to the truth which alone will facilitate the growth of the Kingdom.  They are called to deliver that truth to God’s people on dependence in the Holy Spirit.  Often, we do not appreciate the responsibility involved in this and the accountability that hovers over every preacher.  A colleague tells me that he is embarking on preaching series in the Letter of James.  Sooner or later, he will bump up against these words:

 

‘Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.’   (James 3: 1)

 

If anything should convince us of the responsibility and accountability attached to preaching it is this.  The truths revealed in Scripture are vital to the growth of the Kingdom on earth and can never be undermined by carelessness, superficiality, or self-serving interpretation.  All of which are temptations to the preacher and must be resisted.  The preacher may well wonder on descending the pulpit: ‘Did they get the message?’   Of equal importance for the preacher on ascending the pulpit is to ask: ‘Have I got the message?’  

 

That became important for me once again last Sunday when I preached at an evening service in Renfrew Trinity.  First time in eight months!  It felt good and I am grateful to my minister, Stuart Steell, for the opportunity.  But more than my satisfaction is how the preaching was received in eternity.  Did the angels rejoice in the Word that sustains and brings growth to the Kingdom?  

Still Quarrying: Seven Psalms.

 My first contact with the music of Paul Simon was at a BB District Service.  This must have been in the mid 1960s and as part of the service the young minister played two recorded Simon and Garfunkel songs, providing us with printed lyrics to follow.  One was definitely ‘I Am A Rock’.  I think the other was ‘You Can tell the Word’ from their first album.

 

This was the first time I had heard recorded music in a church service, and it made a big impact.  It made a big impact on our BB Captain also but it was not favourable!  But it  made me think that S&G were worth exploring.  I became a fan and over the years have found Paul Simon worth keeping in touch with.  From a Jewish background but nevertheless professing not to be religious he is among those artists who would describe themselves as ‘spiritual.’  I’m never sure what is meant by this but in Paul’s sense I think it means an appreciation of the ‘deeper’ things in life and an openness to the existence of God.  This has come out in albums over the years but never more clearly than in his latest offering: ‘Seven Psalms’.  

 

The title itself says something to anyone from a Jewish or Christian background.  The Book of Psalms has been described as the Prayer Book of Israel and the Praise Book of Israel.  It gives believers and opportunity to open up to God in praise but also to express the darker thoughts and emotions that commonly afflict them.  This is its greatest value allowing us to see that the life of faith is not always a travelling on smooth and fragrant ground.  There are dark valleys that cannot be avoided, and they can be bewildering and painful.

 

Paul brings this out in the first movement of the album, which is a continuous 30-minute unfolding, is called ‘The Lord’.  The idea of God brings out positive images:

 

‘The Lord is a virgin forest

 The Lord is a forest Ranger

 The Lord is a meal for the poorest of the poor

 A welcome door to the stranger . . . 

 

The seeds we gather 

 From the gardener’s glove

 Live forever

 Nothing dies of too much love.’  

 

That is a final line  destined to be quoted much!  But ‘The Lord’ ends on a darker note which we cannot escape when considering the God of the Bible, a book which Paul reveals in a recent interview is never very far from him:

 

‘The Covid virus is the Lord

 The Lord is the ocean rising

 The Lord is a terrible swift sword

 A simple truth surviving.’  

 

People of faith cannot really escape this.  The struggle we sometimes have in the promise that nothing will ever separate us from the love of God, not even the darkest,  the most painful experiences, and yet when they come they take us to the end of ourselves.   And yet Paul is not content to leave it there.  In ‘My Professional Opinion’, which is an aspiration to ‘carry my grievances /down to the shore/And wash then away in the tumbling tide’, he ends with a startling declaration:

 

‘All that really matters

 Is the one who became us

 Anointed and gamed us

 With His opinions.’  

 

If the sleeve-notes are to be trusted, then the higher case at ‘His’ belong to the author.  

 

So where does it all take us this quite remarkable album which has been attracting those proverbial ‘rave reviews’?  Some might say that it’s typical of the large community of ‘spiritual’ people who treat things beyond sight, touch and sound like a giant smorgasbord from which you can pick or choose whatever appeals to you.  I would not agree with this.  He may not have made the crucial breakthrough to faith in Christ but Paul offers us personal insight that leads to confession, an awareness of inspiration as a gift – Dip your hand in heaven’s waters/God’s imagination/ Dip you’re your hands in Heaven’s waters’ – and in the final song, ‘Wait’, there is a longing for completion in a life to come:

 

‘I want to 

 Believe in

 A dreamless transition

 Wait

 

 ‘I don’t want 

 I don’t want to be near 

 My dark intuition.

 

‘I need you here by my side

My beautiful mystery guide

Wait.’

 

Which in the end is where all people of faith arrive.

Still Quarrying: The Less Dead.

 Even hardened crime fiction fans can find Denise Mina hard to take.  The language, the violence, the psychological disturbance - too deep a descent into the darkness for some people.  The Less Dead might be an example of this.  Briefly, the central character is Margo, a doctor,  who was adopted as a baby.  She goes in search of her birth mother and discovers that she was a sex worker who was murdered, one of a series of women murdered in Glasgow at that time.  The killer has never been found.

In her ‘Acknowledgments’ at the end of the book Mina thanks various people who have helped in her research.  As the narrative unfolds it is obvious that she has engaged with many of the issues that surround sex work, not least the negative attitudes of society in general to the women involved.  The work is never commended but the lack of compassion for those who feel driven to the work and are constantly vulnerable to physical abuse and sometimes murder is highlighted and challenged.  The title of the book is a description apparently used by police to describe sex workers.  Nikki, who turns out to be Margo’s aunt, says: ‘When we get killed they call us the “less dead”, like we were never really alive to begin with.’  

It’s a powerful book focussing not just on the ‘issue’ but on the conditions that drive women to  this lifestyle and the dangers they face when involved.   Sometimes it does feel more like a polemic than a narrative, and at least one critic I have read recently, is not happy with the tendency of some crime novelists to use their work to ride their hobby horses.  I take this point but if you have a deeply felt concern and you are gifted as a storyteller then this can be a powerful medium to alert others to things that need to be exposed and changed.  Ian Rankin has recently written:

‘While I have written in a variety of genres, I continue to find the crime novel the perfect vehicle for a discussion of contemporary issues in the most unflinching terms.  After all, the detective has an ‘all areas pass’ to every aspect of the contemporary urban sene, and this is the way for the crime writer to take the reader into forbidden territory . .  .’   

The he danger for the writer is that the ‘contemporary issues’ can dominate to the detriment of the narrative thus affecting the reader’s engagement.  But I have to say I am grateful for the experience of reading The Less Dead.  Great plotting, well-drawn characters, some brilliant turns of phrase and it took me into  that ‘forbidden territory’ which exists beyond the novel.  

Thoughts of the Incarnation of Jesus were never far away.  The apostle John tells us that ‘The Word became flesh’, not in an sanitised, uncomplicated world.  In the Israel of Jesus’ day women sold sex, tax collectors swindled the poor, wrongdoers could be stoned to death or nailed to a cross.   John writes: ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us.’    (John 1: 14)  Among us!  The original Greek of those words can be translated: ‘The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.’  Jesus never excluded himself from any area of society, even that inhabited by ‘the less dead.’   The religious establishment of his day were scandalised by his keeping company with the sex workers of his day.  They could not grasp that to find the lost sheep you have to search, to raise the fallen you have to get alongside, to heal you have to reach out.  

The Less Dead has no one that might be described as a conventional ‘hero.’  But there are women who may have made self-destructive choices in their past but who have a deep inner strength.   This has enabled them to endure violence, addiction, injustice, rejection, and yet still to care for others who have fallen into the darkness they have known.   God is a faint echo in the world of this book but we are drawn into the world of individual women and men, human beings who Scripture tells us are created in the image of God.  Someone has said that no matter their moral and spiritual condition His fingerprints are on their lives, shown in those things said and done that enhance the lives of others and strengthens community.  And according to the teaching of Jesus no one falls out of the loving focus of God.  In a recent interview Denise Mina describes herself as ‘a hopeful person’ and that this is her personal choice.  She doesn’t go into the reasons for her hopefulness.  But I can hope because of the love shown to the world in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  It was his destiny, in the words of Isaiah, to be ‘despised, and . . . held in low esteem’ (Isaiah 53: 3) He was among the ‘less dead’ of his day.  But the forgiveness that flows from his death and the renewal promised in his resurrection has given us a strong foundation for hope.    

Still Quarrying: Core Strength

An article by Alex Massie in the Sunday Times caught my attention more than usual.  He was examining how adherents of a particular political party allowed their allegiance to define the ‘core of their being’.  He supported this by reference to a recent survey which showed that a majority of this party’s members took personally any criticism of their party or their party’s leader.   

I suppose this could be extended to many different areas of life.  Football teams, authors, singers, church traditions.  The list is endless.  A blow against any cherished part of our being is a blow against us.  And experience shows that it can affect personal relationships.  Love me love my politics, my team, my church.   If any of this, and this is just a small representation, has allowed to sink so deeply that it defines the ‘core of our being’ then we need to be concerned.

Thinking about this my mind was drawn to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.  Some years ago he went public over his discovery that the man he had always thought was his biological father was not in fact.  He told the complicated story but in the end said that although he had been shocked, and there were issues arising from this he would have to deal with, he was reassured in the knowledge that his real identity was in Jesus Christ.  It was this that defined ‘the core’ of his being.  

This issue of who we are in Christ comes through powerfully in the thought of the apostle Paul.  In Philippians 3: he reflects on the things that defined his core being as an orthodox Jew:

‘ . .  . circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.’  (Vv. 5-6)

But he goes on:

‘But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.  What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.  I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ . . .’  (vv. 7-8). 

All these influences that shaped his inner being he know regards as ‘rubbish’ compared to what he has found to be true in Christ.  It is this which must shape his core being.  Having pout his trust in Jesus, and received His Spirit, nothing should get in the way of the Spirit’s work, to shape him from within according to the pattern of Jesus’ life, to produce ‘love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.’  (Galatians 5: 22-23.). 

You have no doubt heard it said the God works in mysterious ways.  He certainly works in surprising ways.  I am grateful to a Sunday Times journalist in leading me to a serious spiritual check-up.  People have been scanning, examining and probing me in various ways over the last three years or so.  I am grateful for this.  But nothing is more important that those occasions when the Spirit opens me up and lays bear the core of my being. 

Still Quarrying: The Fruitful Vine.

I have not been a diligent blogger recently.  At many levels the medication I am on at present is taking its toll.   However, what follows below appeared as a Facebook memory today, a pastoral letter I wrote eleven years ago when I was coming to terms with a blood abnormality that might develop into cancer.   I have no clear memory of having written it but thought it might be appropriate in the season of Lent.

 I had never read anything by Ben Okri until recently when this prize-winning novelist and poet wrote an article for a Sunday supplement.  He mentioned his childhood in Nigeria  in a time of civil war.  Young Ben saw things that even now he finds difficult to talk about.  Dead bodies in rivers.  People shot in the streets.  He writes:

 

‘I’ve blanked out a lot of it.  But writing comes partly out of being wounded by life.  Something has had to have bruised and shaken you a little bit; otherwise, why do we ask questions?  It’s very rare that people who have lived perfect lives become artists because the need to create art is connected to a need to heal something that is imperfect.’

 

There’s a lot to think about there but I am struck by his idea that suffering can be creative.  Certainly, you don’t have to go too far into the artistic world to find this borne out.  The painting of Van Gogh and the music of Tchaikovsky were the products of tortured psyches - and it has often been said that Bob Dylan is at his best when he is going through a bad time. 

 

Let’s be clear.  Suffering is never to be commended.  No one wants it.  Of course there are people, perhaps the majority, who look at their suffering and find no answer to the question why and, moreover, see no good in it.  But the testimony of people like Ben Okri shows there is this other side to the darkness.  And then there is the Cross.  On the face of it a disgusting spectacle but it stands at the centre of our faith as an assurance that there is forgiveness with our God and the promise of a life beyond this life.  Jesus sacrifice was motivated by a need to heal something that was imperfect in us.

 

This tells me that there are no no-go areas for our God, not even our experiences of pain, abandonment and anguish.  Nothing prevents him working out His purpose in our lives; in fact he works through our suffering to make us the people he wants us to be.  Jesus once said something startling: ‘I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener.  He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.’  (John 15: 1-2)  I confess that I haven’t done much pruning in the garden but doesn’t it involve cutting, breaking and sap bleeding from branches?  But it is all necessary for the plant or tree to grow towards its full fruitfulness.  Jesus says the same process is necessary for spiritual fruit to grow in our lives. 

 

This is one of the challenges of Easter.  To live as Jesus lived in the firm conviction that while the Father’s will is sometimes hard, it is always good.