Faith and Moby Dick

Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab

In Herman Melville’s masterpiece, Moby Dick, Ishmael wanders into a chapel in New Bedford and examines all the memorials to past sailors and whale-hunters. Overcome by a sense of the sorrows of the past and made more than aware of the forebodings of future peril, Ishmael stirs himself:

‘But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.’

It is an arresting image. To describe Faith in such graphic and fleshly, if not downright menacing terms leaves me wondering about the nature of Melville’s faith and the nature of my own. There is a temptation to think we know definitively what certain words actually mean. We even have the temerity to think this about theological or metaphysical words. The truth is that very often we are simply winging it or, to change the metaphor, we are paddling at the edge of a vast ocean of meaning. Take the word, Truth, for example. Pontius Pilate is often portrayed (perhaps understandably) as the nasty character at the trial of Jesus of Nazareth. But at one point, in response to a comment of Jesus, Pilate asks the question: ‘What is Truth?’ (John 18:38). Pilate has, in some quarters, never been allowed to live that one down. He has become in the minds of these folk a kind of whipping boy, who represents all that is wrong with relativistic, woolly or simply lazy thinking. I think that this is unfair. I say that because I don’t believe (and never have) that there is any such thing as a stupid question. And to ask the question: What is Truth? appears to me to be a pretty good one. To ask that particular question sincerely is to open oneself to the more than obvious possibility that we don’t know all the answers.

And that brings me back to the word that Melville uses – Faith. It, too, can become familiar, like an old pair of slippers. It takes someone of the calibre of a poet or a novelist like Melville to pull us up short and ask us what we mean when we use the word. The poet throws in the bit of grit which makes those slippers feel a little less comfortable. Instead of describing faith in terms of metaphysics, Melville turns to the law of the jungle. He turns to the scavenger picking up the scraps. He adopts the image of the opportunistic hunter surviving among the dregs of life itself. Melville’s faith is not the cosy faith of the church or chapel, but the rougher, hard-bitten faith that is born out of genuine experience. Faith becomes then, not a pleasant feeling, or a quality to be admired or a trophy to be displayed on a pedestal. It is the means by which we survive or perish. Melville’s own upbringing may have contributed to this outlook, but regardless of any autobiographical slant, what he says chimes with me.

One of my many heroes, Søren Kierkegaard once wrote:

‘Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.’

Faith cannot be anything but passionate. Less than that and it is mere polite interest in the subject known as God. Faith was never intended to be the window dressing of life, but its mainstay. Faith is its own raison d’etre. And our lives are the poorer when we try to tame that particular jackal.

New to be Old to be...

Yes, it's been far too long! Summer has come and gone and I have been more than a trifle lazy about posting. Quite a few changes have happened since my last offering. Paul Romano has moved on from St. Margaret's to serve as the new Rector of St Ninian's Pollokshields and I wish him well. It seemed, though that, no sooner had Paul left than we discovered that we were to receive a new curate, Maggie McTernan. She was ordained last week and is settling in very well to her new church family. So the sense of newness carries on (for me, at least). New can be overrated of course. The technological drive that seems to be hard-wired into our culture (I sense the irony here as I type) has a tendency to leave us idolising the latest thing. But in some areas of life, the latest thing may be the last thing you want. Last night I was chatting with another ordinand (that's someone soon to be ordained, in case you didn't know!) about the feeling I have that theology is one of those subjects about which it is hard to be trendy because there is a sense in which it has all been done before. That's not to say that I'm a reactionary, theologically speaking. I'd like to think I'm far from that. But there is a tradition. And it is only when one recognises that tradition can one sensibly and constructively transcend it in some tiny way. To be new means to be old.

Walt Whitman, someone who witnessed at first hand the horrors of untrammelled technological advance during the American Civil War, captured in a few lines what I'm trying to say:

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 of that name;

The true Son of God shall come, singing his songs.

Those songs have been sung throughout human history, but we often have to slow down to hear their radical melody.


Meanwhile, here's Maggie really enjoying the newness of her situation...

Hello Moments

We are, as you know, in the season of Pentecost - the season of the Spirit. One of the things I find myself tempted to lose sight of is what being re-connected with the Spirit means. I reckon I'm not the only one. Too often (if we think about it at all) we are tempted to associate the experience of the Spirit with the extra-ordinary rather than simply realising that to be connected to the Spirit is to be more fully connected to the ordinary…and it is that connection which makes the ordinary extraordinary. I call these experiences of connection or re-connection ‘hello’ moments.

 My oldest son, Stephen and I are Liverpool fans, and a good example of a ‘hello’ moment was when Liverpool were 3 – 0 down at half time in the Champions League Final a few years ago. Everyone thought that all was lost (including me I have to say). The second half duly got underway and within a few minutes of the restart Liverpool got a goal back. The rest, as they say, is history… they went on to win 4 – 3 and it became probably the greatest night in Liverpool Football Club’s long list of outstanding sporting achievements. I mention all this (yes there is a point!) because when that first Liverpool goal went in, the commentator made the immortal remark, ‘Hello?’ It was a single word, but it held within it a whole world of possibility.

That’s what ‘hello’ moments are. They are moments of revelation where a whole world of possibility is open to us. They are moments when we become aware of the extraordinary in the ordinary. The Spirit’s job is to get alongside us and gently nudge us in the direction of consistently saying ‘hello’ to life.


Here is that great 'hello' moment.. if you don't like football then just listen to the Liverpool Anthem, 'You'll Never Walk Alone', which, if you've ever heard it sung at Anfield, you'll recognise as another 'hello' moment.

Loitering Without Intent

The ascension has been described as the last of the Crises of the Christ – moments of dramatic illumination or dramatic change, (his birth, baptism, temptation, transfiguration, crucifixion and resurrection being the others).

But in many ways the crisis of the ascension is a crisis not just for the Christ, but for us. And this is illustrated in the way the disciples behave – In the account in the book of Acts, Luke has the disciples asking a question. They ask what seems to me to be the most parochial of questions – "When will you restore the kingdom to Israel?" I don't know about you, but if this was the last time I was going to be able to ask a question of someone like Jesus, it would have been something a bit more profound than that - 'Why do people suffer?' seems a good one to start with. Despite everything they had witnessed, they still saw Jesus as some kind of local hero, instead of the king of the universe. And the second thing the disciples do, as Jesus is glorified before their very eyes, is simply to stand there, mouths agape. "Why do you stand there (looking gormless?!)" says the angel. 

For me the disciples' question and their standing around represents our crisis. We in the church can often find ourselves wondering, ‘Well what now?’ We metaphorically stand around looking gormless. In some cases metaphor doesn’t enter into it! The absence of Christ can lead us to be persuaded that the church has an absence of leadership or purpose. As a result, we end up looking at the small picture; we end up asking the small questions, we end up standing around waiting for something, anything to happen. 

And yet, in all of this God is patient, and we are quietly but consistently reminded to think bigger, to ask the difficult questions, to look beyond the obvious and to live our lives in the glorious knowledge of Christ’s victory. Cardinal Newman (not the kind of bloke I can ever imagine having a pint with) describes what the ascension ought to mean to us rather well:

Christ is already in that place of peace, which is all in all. He is on the right hand of God. He is hidden in the brightness of the radiance which issues from the everlasting throne. He is in the very abyss of peace, where there is no voice of tumult or distress, but a deep stillness--stillness, that greatest and most awful of all goods which we can fancy; that most perfect of joys, the utter profound, ineffable tranquillity of the Divine Essence. He has entered into His rest. That is our home; here we are on a pilgrimage, and Christ calls us to His many mansions which He has prepared. 

Cardinal John Henry Newman 

The Beginning of the World As We Know It

It would appear that we are all still here, after all. It won't have gone unnoticed that much internet and general press hay has been made over claims by a certain Harold Camping, who was completely convinced that May 21st was to be the day when everything came to an end. The apocalyptic starting gun, in the form of a chain of earthquakes, was to be fired in New Zealand (that probably makes up for the fact that they are always first for the good stuff like Christmas and New Year) and then spread around the globe. Meanwhile, avoiding all the mayhem, the Rapture would take all the true believers from the earth. And that, as they say, would be that. But it wasn't. And I can't help wondering what Harold must have felt waking up that day of days, not in heaven, but in his own familiar bed in his own familiar house in his own familiar street. CBS news has him quoted as saying that he was 'flabbergasted'. That's an understatement of epic proportions.
It is easy to make Harold and his followers a target for ridicule, but the whole idea of the end of the world got me thinking about the beginning of the world. Not in the sense of Genesis and creation, but in the sense in which the world is renewed each day. We share a deep resonance, I believe, in which we know or feel that the world is always ending and always beginning. Within this general feeling there are epiphanies which make such endings and beginnings more tangible. These moments occur throughout our lives, and it seems to me that to keep our eyes open for those times and seasons is what offers the true apocalypse, the true lifting of the veil. And it is such a revelation which provides us with the resources, regardless of the changes and chances of this life, to live more peacably.
It's the beginning of the world as we know it.... and that essence of life is captured exquisitely by REM in their ironic homage to the subject....

Dancing about architecture

Last night I joined a small group from the Mothers' Union in the Ayrshire Region of our diocese. The evening was devoted to the subject of Prayer. Spelling it as I just have with a capital 'P' in a sense is a reminder to me of what I was trying to get across last night. In our imagination, prayer can very quickly become something big. On the strength of this leap of the imagination there quickly follows the temptation to regard prayer as something we aspire to. It becomes something we must learn. Subconsciously it becomes something always a little bit out of reach. I discovered the other day that Amazon has over 200,000 books devoted to prayer! I'm reminded of the line from Elvis Costello who said: Writing about music is a bit like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to do. 
Of course, there's nothing wrong about writing or reading books on prayer, and it clearly implies there's a market out there for this devotional material. But I wonder if, in the face of all this verbiage, one can be left with the false impression that there is some thing we are not getting when it comes to prayer, some esoteric technique or talismanic form of words. It strikes me that when Jesus was asked by his disciples to teach them to pray, he offered no such technique. Even though we now regularly repeat the Lord's Prayer, I have the feeling that all Jesus was trying to get across to his friends was to simply pray.
The Incarnation, if nothing else, surely shows us that a sea change has come about in our relationship with God. Certainly we cannot be flippant in our attitude to prayer, but I have the feeling that the abiding sense God wishes for us is that prayer is the expression (whether in words or without words) of an already existent reality. We needn't dance about architecture when it comes to prayer. We just need to dance.

Refusing to be Enemies

Today I had the privilege of attending a meeting at St Aidan's Episcopal Church, Clarkston, where I heard an inspiring account of the life and work of Daoud Nassar, Director of Tent for Nations. I don't have the space to tell his full story so, if you watch the video, I will leave that to Daoud and his colleagues....

Speaking to Daoud after the meeting, I was struck by his insistence upon the fact that political solutions, whilst clearly important, are not particularly relevant for him. What is of far greater significance is the seemingly insignificant gesture of Refusing to be Enemies ( a statement written in numerous languages on the huge boulders which mark the entrance of Tent of Nations). Daoud seems to be engaged in what can only be described as an attempt to end the politics of estrangement. The only way he can do that is to refuse to be the fall guy, i.e. to refuse to play the part of the enemy, and refuse to see the Jewish settlers, who are seeking to take his land by whatever means, as enemies themselves.


Daoud's approach reminds me of the image of the kingdom that Jesus offers us where he talks about the yeast that leavens the bread. It's an innocent sounding metaphor, but there is something quietly, spiritually, subversive about it. Gandhi must have had people like Daoud in mind when he said: Be the change you want to see in the world.


Pray for the life and ministry of Daoud and Tent of Nations, that they may continue to quietly leaven the loaf.

The Old in the New in the Old

Over the last couple of days, I've attended two conferences - the first, on Saturday, marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible, held in New College, Edinburgh - the second, held today at St Silas Church in the West End of Glasgow, covered the topic of Ministering to those with Dementia. Both were excellent events and both illustrated for me the importance of recognising the old in the new in the old. One of the startling things about the KJV is that it was such a radical event in the life of the Church and, indeed, the country. We, of course, tend to look at a text from 1611 and glibly dismiss it as simply.. well, old, with all the concomitant negativity normally associated with age - crustiness, irrelevance, incomprehensibility. In our reflection on the KJV we don't tend to think of words like 'radical' or 'ground-breaking'. Such prejudice, I believe, is fuelled largely by an ignorance of history, but also by a more subtle modernist agenda (which is alive and well in our so-called post-modern world). This agenda consistently strives for definition and seeks to classify the life out of life. Function comes before Form in the modernist agenda - so the argument runs: 'It may be beautiful but if we can't understand it...' Yet, surely that is at least part of the reason why we should continue to not only honour but read the KJV. We should grapple with Scripture rather than using it as a tag-line or a slogan. I guess what I'm hinting at is that the KJV leads us to respect the mystery of faith. In this sense the old becomes new insofar as it reminds us of the daily challenge to live out this mystery. But it also offers us the lesson that newness is to be found in the old, if we choose to look for it.
The same thought occurs to me in our interaction with those with dementia, or indeed with the elderly more generally. The one lesson I learned today was to see, truly see, the person before me, and to realise the revelation (the old in the new in the old) that can be traced in the most unlikely of places. This is summed up so beautifully in a poem by Christina de Luca:



The wilderness within you has been stripped:
only the graininess is left.
Yet so much intact,
despite erosion of that sense of self;
so much remaining
which can cross the chasms
when words get in the way of knowing
a touch, a smile –
with your engrained benevolence
you make me mindful of what humanness entails.
You have no cogent thought, and yet
your muddled words
are full of thoughtfulness.


I sing for you, and wonderfully
you join in, add harmony.


          Then shall the tongues of the dumb sing
          for in the wilderness shall waters break out,
          and streams in the desert.


I feel as Moses must have felt
striking the rock.

Welcome to my world

Welcome to my Understandababel World!

To be honest, I've often felt blogging to be a somewhat ambigous activity, particularly for someone in my line of work. The better angels of my Presbyterian upbringing whisper in my ear that it merely serves to promote a dodgy culture of self-aggrandizement. I've certainly come upon much that falls into that category. Ego issues aside, I've often simply wondered whether I have very much of interest to share with Cyberworld. Frankly, I would rather not waste your time and mine. But here we are and so, once again, I bid you welcome to my world, such as it is.

And what is it? Well, I've decided that it can only be my Understandababel World. The picture above is, of course, The Tower of Babel, (1563) by Pieter Brueghel, the Elder, (one of his two Babel paintings). It vividly captures the hubris of the engineers who seek to design a structure which would match anything the gods could come up with. Unfortunately, according to Brueghel's depiction, they clearly haven't built it very well, and the whole enterprise seems on the point of collapse. But nonetheless the structure remains fixed, as it were, in Brueghel's canvas. This painting is really telling us that humanity has the unique knack of consistently kidding itself that it is all-conquering. We consistently misinterpret our ability to master our universe. We overreach. The irony, of course, is that the painting, itself, remains. Brueghel's picture in my mind at least represents the Understandababel World - a world of contradictions and ambiguities, a world where all of life can be appear permanently on the point of collapse, but nonetheless, remains. This is the world in which we live and love and struggle and grow. We try to understand it but are reminded daily of the tremendous challenge that such a task involves. But we don't stop trying. The Understandababel World is my world and I'm more than happy to show you around and let you see what I've found so far...