St Luke’s View

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A long time ago I heard a comment that froze me to the marrow. It came from a neighbour after the deaths of family members in a car accident. She said – we have had so many good times together that now we must pay for them. The implication was that there was some celestial bank book of happiness and misery. Have too much of one and you were bound to have a dollop of the other in some mystical accounts balancing act.

Well, whether you think that way is up to you. However, there may be a grain of truth in this pessimism. And it is this. If life is to enjoyable and fun and fulfilling then we need to love someone. When the time of parting comes – a fact made inevitable by our biology – then the result is loss and bereavement. From that stark viewpoint there is an natural reckoning. Yet, surely, there must be more? For if we are more than molecules and human life more than a pre-programmed struggle to survive then there is a higher plane; a place where personality and creativity and love have a very real existence, a place where these humanities lie beyond the mortality of the material world and a place we might call by a very ancient name – Heaven.

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Kellie Castle, Fife

As a devout Roman Catholic, the Scottish Sculptor, Hew Lorimer, believed that an artist’s work was just an extension of God’s creativity. At his studio at Kellie Castle, Fife, is written his quote:

I came to see that human is not what is paramount in the creative process; what is paramount is ‘The Creation’ and He who created it and that what the true artist is expressing is not himself but his response to the eternal process of creation.

Just seen on another blog:

If you ask me what I came to life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.
~ Emile Zola

Over the next few weeks, new MP after callow MP will make their maiden speeches in the Commons. Yet how much will the world be changed? Precious little I’ll be bound! But it was not always so . For my continuing reading of Juliet Nicolson’s history of 1911, ‘The Perfect Summer’, has brought me to that infamous dandy, brilliant barrister and MP, FE Smith. Now when he made his hour long debut to the House in the early 1900′s, his own party were rolling in their pews and the scowling opposition were mattering ‘Who is this boy!” Indeed, his barnstorming performance even created quite a flutter in the Ladies Gallery with many invitations to dinner the outcome of his eloquence. So he at least changed his social circle and probably his girth. No wonder he quickly became a companion of the young Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, whose own quick wit earned him the epithet – he thinks with his mouth. Well where are fine words to be found today? Not coming out of politicians if the General Election’s National Debates were their arena. Broadcasters too hardly rate much higher; tune in reluctantly to Talksport Radio if you don’t believe me . And certainly there are few great orators in pulpits these days; myself included. In truth, even the average ‘Thought for the Day’ is more likely to lull back to slumber than inspire the redeeming of the world. No, today’s greatest wordsmiths are found in the advertising profession. For if you have to get your message over in 30 seconds of exorbitant TV time then you do need to have your verbal wits about you. Maybe then, there is something to be said, or not, for the Twitter discipline of having only 140 characters. Since if we can only get one word in edge-ways, in this talkative globe, let it be the right one!

This afternoon, I did something terribly old fashioned. I just sat in the garden reading a book with a sun hat on. Old fashioned because everyone else seems to be doing something. In fact, it seems positively sinful to sit at home and enjoy the sun’s warmth. Actually, I was reading the witty an enjoyable ‘The Perfect Summer’ by Juliet Nicolson. Its a social history of the summer of 1911; the last beautiful season before the Great War. No wonder then it is subtitled – dancing into the Shadow. However, despite the growing storm clouds, there was something appealing about those years. In particular, the less pressured life when personal news came through the letter box and world tidings via the newspaper. No social websites, emails, mobile phones and satellite TV for them.

Of course there is much from that age that we would not tolerate for a minute today. Yet their pace of life with its weekly routine must beat our 24/7 obsession. Their seasons must have the pleasure of reacquaintance ship that our unbroken desire for the fruits of the globe dulls. Their joy at a perfect summer must have been greater than ours faced as it is with a constant stream of days that all seem the same in their rapidity of passing. So maybe we should,from time to time, bring some of the peace of nearly one hundred years ago back to our living of these frenetic times. Hopefully then we too will rediscover a perfect summer by visiting times gone just by being still.

For St Luke’s news, history, photos, sermons & youth talks visit http://www.broughtystlukes.com

“Assistant to electricals – customer waiting!” – the supermarket loudspeaker blares out and that half amuses and half annoys. For the suggestion is that if some unfortunate doesn’t get themselves amongst the kettles ‘tout suite’ then something unspeakable, possibly lingering, will happen to them. It’s all nonsense, of course. They’ll finish their cuppa and amble along in due course. Yet the illusion has been maintained – you are a valuable, even an invaluable, customer whose time is as rubies.  Moreover, the company’s fiction is sprayed around like fake coffee aroma – our clients have status instead of just being till roll receipts.

It’s for these reasons too we lap adverts of smiling call centre staffs, waving shop-keepers and bank tellers who are family friends. For deep down we want to be part of a community of which we are real part – where the people we meet have some sort of concern for us as humans. Needless to say this type of community is possible even sustainable; it just takes investment. That means the spending not of money but time and emotional energy. Since the bottom line is we get what we pay for. The question must be is there a “customer waiting!”