New Baptist Kidd on the Blog

It is a strange business – how, in one sense, we can ‘know about’ something for many years and yet, in another, not ‘know’ it at all. I have long been aware of ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, ‘The Blue Rider’ movement, and its radical artistic adventures in the early twentieth century. Individually, I have enjoyed many of the works of its main contributors: the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and, with less educated conviction, the artist-composer Arnold Shoenberg. Then, suddenly, I find these prophetic artists seeming to say everything I have ever wanted to say – although I have never known quite how.

Some background might be useful. Undoubtedly the visionary inspiration for ‘The Blue Rider’ came from Wasssily Kandinsky, although from the start it was an essentially collaborative venture, and would never have left the starting gate without the committed involvement of many other artists, mostly painters and musicians. The name was the title chosen by Kandinsky and Marc for the movement’s first and most famous publication, ‘The Blue Rider Almanac’ of 1912. This is a picture of the cover, an original design by Kandinsky for general use as a symbol of the movement:

The Almanac was a bibliographical expression of the rationale underlying a number of exhibitions staged under the same name. The movement was essentially eclectic - hence the unusual juxtaposition of painters and musicians. More than that, however, ‘The Blue Rider’ deliberately avoided identification with any one off-the-shelf artistic style – and this was the first feature forcibly to strike me in its potential to dialogue with more recent movements and ideas.

Kandinsky was clear in his conviction that rigid alignment to any single artistic style seals a death warrant on genuine creativity. He spells this out in considerable detail in his now famous treatise, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ – one of the few major texts out of the western world exclusively dedicated to a dialogue between art and spirituality. In it he suggests that, at any given moment of cultural history, there are rarely more than a few artistic pioneers who actually live on the leading edge, at the top of the artistic pyramid, as it were. These few are those who are able to cut themselves free from the shackles of all previous styles and schools of thought, and are genuinely able to ‘do a new thing’. They put down markers ahead of their time, and effectively create the possibility for new cultural futures. Contrastingly, the majority of artists, working within one or more already established styles might seem to create the new but, in reality, their work is no more than a fresh example of something that has already become dated and lifeless. They seem to put down markers too, but these are already behind the crest of the advancing cultural wave.

This is an fascinating model for understanding the continuing movement of artistic styles, and goes some way towards explaining one of those things which has remained a mystery to me for many years – precisely why it is that new artistic expressions generate such extreme vitriolic responses, not only in the public at large, but also in the more rarefied communities of the art establishment. It has happened over and over again with each new generation of artists; even though it is also well understood that the same works of art, pilloried in one generation, will almost certainly become the priceless and sought after treasures of the next. The pattern has been repeated generation after generation, though rarely with greater force than in the turbulent years around the turn of the twentieth century. I have written elsewhere (‘God and the Art of Seeing’) about the scathing reception given to Edvard Munch’s painting, ‘The Sick Child’, in Norway in the mid-1880s; and the venomous reception given to Monet’s now world famous images of water lilies and haystacks is now well-documented as one of the conundrums of art history.

I had already learned to recognise a familiar sociological motif at work in this phenomenon, the creation and preservation of a closed circle, an establishment – but Kandinsky, I think, offers a more subtle window of understanding. It is not just that the boundaries of the establishment and its club are threatened; more than that, genuine pioneers are doomed to be misunderstood, because they are actually thinking what up until then has remained literally unthinkable. Because what they are thinking has not previously been thought, there do not exist any readily accessible conceptual categories with which to facilitate its reception. (I am reminded here of Kuhn’s analysis of the way in which revolutions take place in models of scientific thinking, paradigm shifts as he calls them.) Cultural critics, exclusively drawing on categories derived from the past, simply do not have the apparatus with which to interpret and therefore appreciate the arrival of the genuinely new.

By commending freedom from commitment to any single artistic style (the Almanac brings together and affirms examples of works of art from many different eras and many different locations) Kandinsky is encouraging an attitude which is, at least, more likely to be able to embrace the genuinely new and to experiment freely beyond the boundaries of local fashion. Examples, peppering the Almanac, are described by Kandinsky as ‘the best’ from the leading edge in earlier specific times and places; his message is that their value deserves to be honoured, but that it would be foolishness to extol them as ‘the best’ for our own unique time and place. They did their pioneering work in their own time and place, but most of their creative potential is now exhausted. This is a very strong statement concerning the contextual nature of aesthetic values.

All of which fascinates me enormously when I begin to think about movements within religions, and the passionate commitments people make to religious and/or spiritual styles – past and present. I am reminded, for example, of the derisory anger which my own enthusiasm for the early charismatic movement in the 1970s generated amongst more traditional Baptists; and I am also reminded of my repeated discovery of ‘sects within sects’, dedicated groups of followers of this or that, still passionately committed to forms of believing which belong to moments in the Christian era now long dead. It makes me want to do a Kandinsky. I want to create a ‘spiritual almanac’ which affirms and commends a wide variety of spiritual resources from a great range of times and places. I want, for example, to commend and to enjoy the icons of early Christian centuries, to be moved by the wild and sometimes terrifying writings of so-called ‘desert fathers’, to benefit from the quiet reflectivity of contemplative mystics, men and women, throughout the centuries; I would even like to discover how to participate in the exuberance of contemporary pentecostal praise - and so on, and so on. The freedom to affirm and commend all these might then, in turn, free me to be able to recognise that as yet un-named somewhat, the special gift for this particular time and place, which I am in the gravest danger of overlooking whilst I remain too embroiled in a single style from the past. I might miss what Kandinsky described as the ‘spiritual in art’, and which today some Christian prophets might choose to describe as ‘what God’s Spirit is doing in our time’. All of which feels remarkably at home in the period we tend to label postmodern – as if we had really significantly moved on from early twentieth century. I am not so sure that we have.

In this ‘breaking with styles’, emphasised by the creators of the Almanac, something quite extraordinary was taking place. The overall direction of ‘The Blue Rider’ movement was clearly orientated towards an affirmation of ‘the abstract’ - something which had not consciously found favour in the cultural history of the west for more than a millennium. In this context, ‘the abstract’ must not to be heard in negative terms, a bid for all that is obscure and inaccessible to interpretation; rather, it should be heard as a massively positive bid to undermine the dominant post-Enlightenment paradigm with its sterile, and too often exclusive, commitment to analytical reason.

It is easiest to illustrate this from the work of Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg first met Kandinsky back in 1911 and each, it seems, immediately recognised in the other something which could draw them together in a single movement. Schoenberg was not entirely unknown as a painter, mainly of portraits, many of himself - though painting was never his strongest mode of artistic expression. He is best known for his experiments with ‘free’ or so-called atonal music – that is, with music which has freedom from the formal conventions in western harmonic traditions. In one of the Almanac’s short essays, by Kulbin, entitled ‘Free Music’, it is argued that, by breaking with the particularity of one harmonic tradition, music is merely re-claiming what has remained unscathed in ‘nature’ despite the development of human cultural history. “The music of nature is free in its choice of notes – light, thunder, the whistling of the wind, the rippling of water, the singing of birds. The nightingale sings not only the notes of contemporary music, but the notes of all the music it likes.” The remarkable thing is that a culture constrained by a very particular harmonic tradition should continue to extol the song of the nightingale as something of peculiar beauty. In commending atonal music, Kulbin enumerates many of the delights in store for the open-eared listener, singling out the distinctively new experiences generated by what he calls “… the close connection of tones and the processes of close connection.” I think it was these ‘close connections’ which, at first, I found most difficulty in appreciating; but with the passage of time, I now can find these quite extraordinarily moving.

In his own celebrated essay in the Almanac, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, Schoenberg himself goes on to argue that music must also resist every compulsion to be programmatic, to replicate, as it were, patterns already laid down in the other arts. So in setting words to music, Schoenberg deliberately refuses to conform to stereotypical assumptions. Traditionally musicians had often felt obliged to match words expressing urgency with rapid tempos, and words expressing restfulness with slow and sombre tones; rather, Schoenberg argues that music must be free to create its own forms of expression, breaking its slavish congruence with other media, and opening up fresh potential to complement and enlarge the possibilities for inspiration.

The reception of ‘free music’, of course, had all the hallmarks that I have already associated with the work of painters, and Schoenberg’s music was rubbished by most of his contemporary critics. The Almanac argues, not entirely surprisingly, that the professional cultural critic, already tied in allegiance to particular styles, is precisely the person who is least likely to be able to ‘hear’ the prophetic inspiration (Kandinsky’s ‘inner sound’) in new forms, be they visual or musical. The ear of the critic has been so ‘tuned’ to the styles of previous times, that there is now no way for ‘the new’ to be heard. As Kandinsky also put it, the critic is a theoretician, and the theoretician is a person capable of little more than discovering ‘mistakes’ in the genuinely ‘new’, however inspired this ‘new’ might be. The theoretician is structurally bound by the ‘rules’ of the past, and is disabled for doing other than negating that which is emerging in the present with genuine significance for the future.

I have no difficulty in relating all this to my own slow and sometimes reluctant journey towards an appreciation of ‘modern’ music. Today I value a measure of freedom to hear the previously unhearable, to be free to test everything for what it is, good or bad, riding as loose as possible to inherited conventions.

Everything Schoenberg affirms about music, Kandinsky parallels in his own crucial essay within the Almanac, ‘On the Question of Form’. Kandinsky is effectively declaring his own right to paint atonally, abstractly, playing the palette of colours and shapes with fresh freedom, expressing real moments of the human spirit which cannot be contained in any previous conventions of concerning form. Kandinsky claims this as the only way to release what he calls the ‘inner sound’.

Breaking the ‘rules’ of form is what, of course, the critics cannot bear. Franz Marc’s horses are the ‘wrong colours’; Schoenberg’s musical phraseology, in his ‘Herzgewächse’ (‘Heart’s Foliage’) for example, does not sufficiently correlate with verbal tones in the libretto. But that is the very point; in a fresh, although internally coherent way, the music provides the possibility of a new, equally valid, depth of insight as yet unheard in the history of music.

One fascinating conviction expressed in the Almanac, and shared by artist and musician alike, is that, in their new-found freedom, they are re-discovering things already known by the majority of children in their infancy, but strangled out of their artistic vocabulary by the processes of formal education – usually by the age of six! Kandinsky is ruthless on this point. He writes, “For every fire there is a cooling off. For every early bud – the threatening frost. For every young talent – an academy. These are not tragic words but a melancholy fact. The academy is the surest way of destroying the power of the child. Even the greatest, strongest talent is more or less retarded in this respect by the academy. Lesser talents perish by the hundreds. An academically trained person of average talent excels in learning practical meanings and losing the ability to hear his inner sound. He produces a ‘correct’ drawing that is dead.” Am I hearing a description of theological education trapped in that cul-de-sac generated at the pinnacle western liberalism? Even Kandinsky is not reluctant invoke the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament for support, pointing out Jesus’s specific allusion to the openness of children to God’s coming kingdom – the starting point for a very stimulating conversation concerning the relationship between artistic and religious forms.

From a religious perspective, I am fascinated by two powerful implications of the Almanac’s analysis of western culture. The first is simply this insight into the freedom of the child to ‘see’ and to ‘hear’ the truth, the prophetic word of God’s Spirit. This is something I have also found amongst people labelled as ‘learning disabled’ – and I find myself musing, as does Jean Vanier on the basis of massive experience by comparison with my own, just who it is in our culture that is disabled in their learning – by a lack or a surfeit of it.

The second runs a little further with this powerful affirmation of ‘the abstract’, peaking in the early twentieth century, and energised by a forceful rejection of the exclusive dominance of the analytical method – which, since the Enlightenment, had posed as the key to all significant truth claims. What ‘The Blue Rider’ group do with such skill is to expose this intellectual blind alley for the dead end it had always been. Whether we look at the playful coloured shapes of Kandinsky, or listen to the ear-stretching tonal games of Schoenberg, the common claim is that these artefacts are able to touch ‘depths’ in the human spirit, which have largely remained untouched by the dominant western cultural inheritance for many years. Tapping back into ‘natural’ forms and ‘primitive’ styles, largely untouched and certainly undervalued for many centuries, these artists speak into their own time and their own place with unique power.

One thing, of course, which they would not want us to do is to idolise their own heavily contextualised achievements in such a way that these too should become dampers on our own contemporary creativity. The invitation from ‘The Blue Rider’ is to ‘ride again’, and again, and again …

All of which, it seems to me, speaks volumes to any who are seeking to explore the potential of contemplative prayer – to which I so frequently return. As I have written in earlier blogs, a clear pre-requisite for such an exploration is liberation from the exclusivity of western obsession with ‘conceptual’ patterns of thought. Until it is possible to think again as a child, and to discover the role of the pre-conceptual and even the non-conceptual, in a fuller vocabulary of human knowing, God will not merely remain a mystery, God will remain a nonsense.

Once again I am reminded of a repeated caution in the writings of Thomas Merton. Merton reminds his readers over and over again not to become reliant on any one ‘mechanism’ of prayer or any one spiritual discipline. It is not that these disciplines are irrelevant - far from it they are essential equipment for the exploration; it is rather that they do not of themselves a guaranteed pathway to enlightenment or deeper insight. Insight only comes as a gift of God’s Spirit and, as such, will only come unsolicited, free from the constraints of any pre-determined conceptualisation (as free as the blowing of the wind, says Jesus in the Fourth Gospel). What we need, then, if we are to discover prayer that has contemplative depth, is a freedom akin to that affirmed in the birth of modern abstract art, which learned again old lessons about ways that deep truth is disclosed, revealed even. Rarely does fresh revelation depend exclusively on old forms, be they geometrical patterns, musical scales, or liturgical prayers. New wineskins will be in constant demand, as old ones will never be able to contain the ferment of the new wine.

I like all that – and could preach a pretty respectable Christian sermon on it too!

Just a little bibliography:
‘The Blue Rider Almanac’, first published 1912 (Tate Publishing 2006)
Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, first published 1911 (Dover Publications 1977)
‘Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider’, Scala Publishers, 2003

Where shall I start? – in this instance, not an easy question to answer.

I shall start with the description of an experience, develop a reflection out of and around it, and conclude with some more technical connections into the archives of Christian traditions.

It was during my stay at St Bueno’s, exploring in a new way what it might mean to speak of ‘Christ in me’ that an old memory lurched back to mind. It had returned several times before through the intervening years; but now, once again, it returned with peculiar relevance. As I described the recollection in my journal a few weeks ago, it read like this:

“It was during my days as an undergraduate in King’s College, Cambridge – so that makes it 1971, thirty-five years ago. I specially remember it as the time when I was first coming into contact with a highly innovative charismatic prayer group, just beginning to meet in Cambridge, recently inspired through a contact with the work of David Watson in York. Heady days! All of which left me with a disturbed and disturbing sense of longing to experience the immediacy of the Holy Spirit in more powerful ways, as others at that time seemed to be doing.

On this particular day, I was the person appointed to read the Gospel at Evensong in King’s Chapel; something I did quite often, though always an inspiring and challenging thing to do. When I looked up the lection for the day, however, particularly given the preoccupation with my intensified search for the gifts of God, I was notably shocked to find I would be reading the dramatic words from Matthew 18:19 “… if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you …” – so I was already becoming alert to a heightened sense of drama.

Anyway, there I was, all togged up in gown and surplice, perhaps thirty seconds before leaving my seat to read at the lectern, when the stranger sitting next to me, without any words or acknowledgement passing between us, handed me a scrappy sheet of paper on which he had just penned some words. This is what he had written:

God in us
trust
trust
else
we’re
less
than
dust.

I felt a kind of shock wave run through me, convinced that something quite extraordinary was happening to me, though quite what I really had no idea. I read the lesson with unusual conviction, returned to my seat still shaking, and tried to concentrate on the remains of the liturgy. When it was complete, I waited until almost everyone else had left the chapel and then turned to the man, who showed no sign of rushing to leave, inquiring who he was, and how I should understand the significance of the paper he had shown me. In one sense the story he told is quite simple, just one more thread in the everyday passage of time and of things, but in another ...

He was a poet, from the United States, visiting Cambridge for one day and, overwhelmed by the beauty of King’s Chapel and the music of King’s Choir, had penned these few words – immediately wanting to show them to someone. That turned out to be me. By this stage, as we sat in the quietening Chapel, he could see how shaken I actually was, but he never allowed me space to intimate that he might in any way have been functioning for me like a messenger from God - though I have always suspected he felt an intimation of this in himself too. I invited him back to my rooms overlooking the river and the King’s bridge over the Cam, for coffee and conversation. What American tourist could refuse an offer like that! We chatted for a while, although, for some reason I now cannot fathom, I ended up with no record of who he was or how I might be in touch with him into the future – and soon he went on his way. I have never seen him again, but the words he showed me on that flimsy scrap of paper have remained scorched on my mind as if it were yesterday – and perhaps, all these years later, I begin to understand a little more what they could possibly be about.”

The whole event felt strange - even as it was happening. Inevitably it all became interwoven with my personal search for some kind of charismatic renewal. As an event, I have certainly never forgotten it, though I do not think I have ever really known how to make sense of its potential significance. Thirty-five years later it becomes significant again for two particlar reasons: first, it is associated for me with a time when ‘strange happenings’ seemed to pass my way with much more frequency than I then recall for most of the intervening years; and second, because the content of the message, that focus on ‘God in us’, now comes back on my agenda with fresh and insistent force.

In the last few months, seemingly without invitation, the frequency of ‘strange happenings’ has shot back up the scale. Like the event in King’s Chapel, none of them is strange in the sense that it is not susceptible to perfectly rational explanation; but all of them are strange ‘to me’, because that is how they strike me, and because they do seem to impact my own life and the lives of others in ways which matter more than run-of-the-mill. Just one illustration must suffice: there I was late one evening on Stockport Station a few weeks ago – very much deserted, and quite a hostile environment for the lone traveller. The only other person in sight was a young woman, and I recall thinking to myself that I needed to keep my distance from her, since a tall bearded stranger could easily present as intimidating at that time of night.

But as I bought my ticket at the machine, I realised that she had come right up and was standing immediately next to me. As I turned to look, she said something like, “I have a terrible headache; it has been an awful day at the hospital.” My first inclination was to look over my shoulder to see the person she was speaking to – but clearly it was me, and she was calling out for help. In retrospect, I can see that I was right about her more than normal vulnerability; my guess is that she had a modest level of learning disability – which, of course, is something I have thought about and worked with a great deal over the years. Well, it turned out we were heading the same way, and I think it would be fair to say that I kind of ‘became her guardian angel’ for while, until finally I said good night to her, still on the train, got off and headed home. It could happen to anyone, any evening, yes; but it happened to me, that particular day, and it had a quality of strangeness, which makes me think again about God at work ‘in me’, ‘in us’.

Which, of course, brings me back to the content of the poem(?), and the phrase ‘God in us’ – without which there not a lot to write home about but dust. I am beginning to develop a new way of feeling for what this might mean – or perhaps better the equivalent phrase ‘Christ in us’. ‘Christ in me’ seems to be quite a good description of this fresh opening up I have been experiencing in my life through recent days. Thomas Merton is in no doubt that it is ‘Christ in me’ and ‘Christ in us’ which is the key to almost everything of significance in spiritual experience.

I suppose I find myself both drawn to and hesitant about the idea of Christ being, in some literal sense, in me. Positively, it offers a convincing, really quite thrilling, framework for understanding the energetic, almost resurrection explosion I have been experiencing within myself. Negatively, however, I hesitate at the apparent exclusivism of its seemingly closed Christian explanation of things. Perhaps another of my own poems from a few weeks ago can offer a way through and beyond this discomfort. I titled it ‘God in us’, and it reads like this:

GOD IN US

Christ,
God giving Godself in the world.

God giving Godself
in bud and leaf-burst
in all people and everywhere.

God giving Godself in me.

God giving Godself
in Confusius, in the Buddha, in Mohamed

and for me, I do confess,
quite amazingly in Jesus.
_____

I am choosing here a very particular way of understanding Christ, or better perhaps ‘Christness’, through the dynamic concept of ‘God giving Godself’. And I am recognising that such giving can take a multitude of forms and expressions. (One friend of mine repeatedly comes out with the line, ‘There has to be more to Christness than Jesus’ – and I now begin to get more of a handle on what he might be meaning.) Without wanting to buy too strongly into some kind of Rahnerian model of the ‘anonymous Christian’, I am wanting to say that the thing I am knowing through my encounter with the person of Jesus is exactly the same thing that others also find in measure by other means – but I am in no doubt that Jesus is the one who has made it happen for me, and I want to confess his importance to me, as clearly and as coherently as I can.

I have found myself renewed in my commitment to what I suspect properly belongs under the heading of evangelism – a word I have shied way from for a number of years. But this kind of evangelism has a very unforced, quite natural mode of expression. Intellectually it relies on the conviction that ‘Christness’, God giving Godself, is a reality in all human beings everywhere, a kind of pre-condition of their very humanity. That is a widely documented theological strategy to which I have also subscribed for some years – it is most certainly in the Roman Catholic theology of Karl Rahner, to whom I alluded earlier, but it is also in the writings of many recent and contemporary Protestants too.

So could these ‘strange happenings’, which have the texture of evangelism, be described as the ‘Christ in me’, as it were, signalling to the ‘Christ is others’?

Let me explain. If I take the example of the girl on the station, she, in her frail and rather broken humanity, was that evening specially open for ‘Christ in her’ to surface through the prompting of her particular movements and words. (This is a quality I have long associated with people who have significant learning disabilities, actually a quality which more able folk like me have typically closed down in ourselves with our excessive of self-confidence and self-assurance.) On the same evening, my guess is that my own more-than-usual heightened openness to Christ, meant that the ‘Christ in me’ could, as it were, call out to the ‘Christ in her’ and a ‘strange happening’ was free to take place.

Well … I merely offer it as a narrative which might illuminate some of the stranger things that happen to us. I works quite well in accounting for a number of things I am struggling to understand. It accounts, for example, for this renewed increase of frequency in ‘strange happenings’ in my own life. And thinking back to 1971, poets are, by trade, dedicated exponents of openness, so it is not at all surprising that a poet could be someone intuitively open to this signalling between persons, which would account at least in part for the striking juxtaposition of certain dimensions in the King’s Chapel event. And it also accounts for the new wave of ‘evangelistic’ encounters which seem to be becoming more a part of my life – in shops, and bus queues, and ‘chance’ encounters with all kinds of folk.

Lastly, then, it has all taken me back to think again about a very specific theological conundrum I wrestled with in the theological biography of the early twentieth century protestant theologian, Paul Tillich – who I studied at length some years ago. Tillich, like many others, became quite convinced early in his theological pilgrimage that, as he would say about the narrative I have offered above, all theological language is ‘symbolic’ – that was his word, today others might say ‘metaphorical’ and mean much the same. But he never rested comfortably with this conviction, and explored in a number of his writings whether perhaps there is at least one non-symbolic (or non-metaphorical) statement lurking somewhere in the background – a statement which would enable, as he once wrote, ‘the whole theological edifice to have a leg to stand on.’ At one time he toyed with the statement, ‘All theological statements are necessarily symbolic’ as the possible leg – the one non-symbolic statement – but its claim on him could not be sustained, and my understanding is that he ended his life with the conviction that no such statement is to be found.

I now think I can see more clearly what was going on in Tillich’s quest. I share with him the desire for a leg on which the whole theological edifice can find a perch – without one I will struggle to find sufficient confidence in my faith convictions to dare the boldness of evangelism. But I wonder if Tillich’s error was the fact that he repeatedly looked for a ‘conceptual’ statement to break through the impasse. Surely this was always doomed to fail, because every conceptualisation is bound to be susceptible to precisely the same symbolic analysis. The ‘leg’, the non-symbolic, the non-metaphorical, can never be more than what Karl Rahner and many other contemporaries, speak of in terms of the pre-conceptual, some immediately given horizon (David Tracy’s phrase) which is the possibility of all genuinely credible knowledge. That it is pre-conceptual is not to question its reality or its crucial importance, but merely to question its epistemological standing. This pre-conceptual givenness, this horizon, is what I think I am calling ‘Christness’, God giving Godself to us. It is ‘Christ in me’, the immediate (non-conceptual) encounter, the most real encounter I shall ever have, which is the ultimate hope of salvation, mine and others.

Now I studied all this, and wrote about it at length in working for my doctorate back in the 1980s – but I think I have come to understand it for the first time with any real force over the course of the last few months. ‘Christ in me’ really is the key – to life, to faith, to salvation, to evangelism – you name it, and ‘Christ in me’ gets in there with notable significance.

I shall clearly be wanting to write about this again from other angles. If you have struggled with the latter paragraphs, just go back and enjoy the stories nearer the beginning – but I would like to think that the whole piece is worth further, perhaps hard, reflection.

As I begin to think about returning to work at the end of this sabbatical on 1st September, I am intensely aware that the first sermon I shall preach will be on the 30th anniversary of my own Ordination, on the first weekend of September 1976. One of the promises I made on that day was ‘to do the work of an evangelist’. I would like to think that as I work away at the renewal of those promises on the coming anniversary Sunday, that particular promise will be made with heightened intent.