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...