Flecks and streaks of gold

 Thought for the Day

4th July 2025

 

Good morning. Arguably the most significant painter of our time is the German artist Anselm Kiefer. Born in 1945 and brought up in the ruins of bombed German cities, his paintings portray a world devastated by war. What is intriguing about an exhibition of his work which has just opened at the Royal Academy however is that it shows his response to the some of the most famous paintings of Van Gogh, a painter who lifts our hearts at the sheer beauty of life.

Kiefer’s paintings are vast, filling a whole wall, and using straw, ash, clay and lead powerfully convey a world laid desolate. With the continuing bombardment of Gaza, and the wars in Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere they well express a mood we can all feel. The paintings also seem to convey landscapes  now experiencing the effect of climate change.   On the other hand, on a nice July morning our personal world can feel very different and quite cheerful. Kiefer and Van Gogh seem to reflect the two different moods we all oscillate between, and in the end two very different stances on life.  Of course Van Gogh’s paintings are not all just sunny optimism. In his famous painting of a corn field there are some black crows flying above. It has long been suggested that this signifies  his mental instability, the fact that he cut his ear off and later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But Kiefer in his response to that painting makes the crows even larger and more sinister, dominating the whole scene.

When I got home and told my wife, who does not fully share my enthusiasm for Anselm Kiefer, about the exhibition, she responded ‘Was there any redemption?’ Good question. In fact amongst all the greys and blacks of Kiefer’s paintings there are flecks and streaks of gold. In Icons and painting of the early Renaissance such as those of Duccio, there are great sheets of gold, gold representing the glory that is behind, beyond and within the universe. Perhaps Kiefer is saying that despite the desolation there is still some glory to be seen.

Few poets have expressed better than Robert Browning the way we can oscillate between a tragic and a hopeful view of life. In his poem Bishop Blougram’s apology he records how one moment we may be deeply pessimistic about life and then as he put it

There’s a sunset touch,

A fancy from a flower bell, someone’s death,

A chorus ending from Euripides

And once again there is what he called ‘The grand perhaps’.

Flecks and streaks of gold as signs of a glory beyond and within. Perhaps.   

Paltering

 Thought for the Day

27th June 2025

 

Good morning. I was introduced to a new word this week. Peter Kellner, the political analyst, in his Substack post wrote about   paltering, meaning to tell a narrow truth in order to mask a big lie. He gives various political examples but a light hearted one would be if someone asked me how my tennis game went and I replied that it was a great second set which I just won without mentioning the fact that I had actually lost the match, that would be paltering. Something true would have been said in a way deliberately to hide the real truth, which Peter Kellner regards as one of the great enemies of politics today.

In a world beset with conspiracy theories, fake news and allegations of fake news, and AI generated stories and images, it is more important than ever to try to get a grip on what is true. For truth is fundamental to what it is to be a human being. Unless we can assume that most people most of the time mean more or less what they say, human communication would be impossible and therefore human life as we know it simply could not exist. I would go so far as to say that if I define myself as a human being I commit myself logically and morally to be a truth seeking, truth telling being.

Of course it is not as easy as that. As a young teenager I was in a play called ‘Nothing but the truth’. The plot was quite simple. Someone had accepted the challenge to go for 24 hours without telling a lie. It is not difficult to imagine all the difficulties and dilemmas which emerge. You are faced with someone who is very vulnerable for example. What they need is encouragement, something positive, not cruel candour.

Then of course every news source has its own point of view, its particular selection and weighing of the facts. The good thing about our society of course is that there are different sources of news, to balance one against the other, as well as the BBC which is committed to carefully scrutinising all  the evidence and reflecting different stances on controversial issues. But this leaves us the hearers, readers and watchers in a very responsible position. We too have to scrutinise and judge.  The ten commandments don’t actually mention the words truth or lie, but the ninth commandment conveys what these terms mean very powerfully when it says ‘Do not bear false witness against your neighbour’. Deliberate lying, and indeed paltering, is false witness, an offence against others and ourselves. It goes against the essence of who we are as truth seeking, truth telling beings.

The people of Iran

Thought for the Day

20th June 2025

 

Good morning. Some 30 years   ago my wife and I had a wonderful holiday in Iran visiting the main sites. Persepolis, of course, the centre of a huge Persian empire in the 6th Century before Christ where we were reminded that one Ruler, Cyrus, was a great friend of the biblical people. As a result of his decree in 539 BC the Jewish people in captivity in Babylon were allowed to go free and return to Jerusalem. One of those decisions which changed the whole course of human history.

Then there is Isfahan with its amazing mosques dating from the Safavid empire in the 16th century covered in their stunning Persian blue tiles, one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

When we landed at Shiraz airport and got off the plane we were greeted by a group of young teenage girls who wanted to speak to the passengers to practice their English. One girl came up to me and to get the conversation going asked me what I did. I replied that I was a kind of Christian Imam-to which she immediately responded with the words ‘I don’t think God is a woman’. Where on earth had she got the idea that I thought this to be the case? I can only imagine she had picked up something from the English media about a debate in the Church of England on feminine terms for God. Anyway I explained to her that God is beyond gender and all that we mean by masculine and feminine are contained in their fulness in the Godhead. She then preached me the most beautiful little sermonette on the theme that God is love. Perhaps this was not totally surprising for Shiraz is the city  of Rumi and Hafez, the 13th and 14th centuries, mystical poets of love revered not just in Iran but round the world. So there I was in an Iranian airport, an Anglican cleric, listening attentively to a 14 year old girl as she told me, in what was for her a foreign language,  about the love of God.

I wonder what that girl, now grown up, is doing with her life? Whether she has put up with the regime or resisted it? According to a major survey conducted earlier this year by the Netherlands based Gamaan Institute 80% of Iranians contacted said they preferred a democratic form of government to the Islamic republic. Many of them will no doubt hope and pray that the time will come one day when they will be free from rulers they have experienced as oppressive and aggressive - at least 901 people were executed last year for example. And I pray that  those of us  outside the country will once again be able to enjoy the richness and beauty of Iranian culture and its people.   

 

 

True peace

  Thought for the Day

Friday 14th March

 

Good morning. We long for the killing to stop. We long for a ceasefire in Ukraine and so many other parts of the world; for the guns and drones to fall silent. At least a pause so that the soldiers can take a break and mothers breathe a temporary sigh of relief. But that is not of course true peace. We want something beyond that, something  more substantial and long lasting.

In the Hebrew scriptures the prophets first of all  warned people against a false peace, one based on illusion,  oppression and injustice. Or as an enemy of the Roman Empire once  put it, as quoted by Tacitus ‘They make a desert and call it peace’. That is why Shalom, the great Hebrew word for peace means much more than the absence of violence. Martin Luther King got the meaning just right when he wrote to some white pastors who had criticised him for stirring up trouble. ‘Peace is not the absence of tension but the presence of justice’. That is the biblical idea of peace.

But there is also another kind of peace which we hanker after-peace within ourselves. Both Swedish and Welsh, just to mention two languages, have different words for the two different kinds of peace,  one to denote the absence of violence, the other an inner peace. It was this second form of peace to which Christ was referring when shortly before his death he told his followers ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid’ (John 14.27)

My question though is how this inner peace relates to the kind of peace we want for the world. If you are deeply involved in a conflict say as a mother who has a child in the front line, how can you have that kind of peace? Because you love them you inevitably  worry about their safety. Indeed anyone who cares will worry about the loss of young life. The alternative is to make oneself as stone, impervious to all feeling. So this peace of Christ does not mean we stop having emotions. What it does  mean is that our lives are rooted more deeply in something beyond ourselves, for Christians, rooted in God, the   ground of our being. Perhaps this peace is like a great stake planted in the ground that holds us firm even as our feelings are blown about by events. And with this stake in the ground we are better able to hold steady as peace makers whether at home, in the community or in world affairs.

Desmond Tutu

Good morning. I first got to know Desmond Tutu when I was Dean of King’s College, London and he came to give a lecture. He told us about his time there as a student: how he liked nothing better than to go out into the Street, find a policeman, and walk round him, simply enjoying the fact that he was in a free country and the police were not enemies. Archbishop Tutu’s mother was a cleaner and the young Desmond was first attracted to the Christian faith by seeing the great Father Trevor Huddleston lift his hat to her every time he passed. This led to the Christian faith becoming the mainspring of his life, and prayer being absolutely fundamental to it. He insisted on beginning every day with a good period of meditation and public prayer before any gathering was entirely natural to him. It was this spiritual life that lay behind his outspoken bravery during the apartheid years when he became the voice of the voiceless in the townships. It was also shown in acts of personal courage. In 1985 a black man accused of being an informer had his car burnt by a mob who were about to throw him on it, as they said, to make a funeral pyre. Desmond Tutu dragged the man away against the howls of those who wanted him killed. But his Christian faith not only led him to condemn injustice wherever it occurred but also taught him to love his enemies. As he said “Enemies are always friends waiting to be made.” And this points to his other great achievement, chairing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid-a hugely ambitious, painful process of trying to tell the truth of what happened and work through to new better set of relationships. I will remember his bravery, desire for reconciliation, his deep spirituality, his personal courtesy to everyone and of course his humour. I have seen him literally roll around the floor with laughter, and he captivated every audience with his smile and humour, often with a sharp political thrust. As he used to joke: “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” A favourite personal memory is spending an evening in his house in Soweto at the height of Apartheid-him drinking rum and coca cola, his standard drink- watching a satirical TV series. One scene showed the Second Coming-which turned out to be of Desmond Tutu himself. I imagine him still laughing now as he is gathered into that heavenly embrace. At a time when it is so easy to be depressed by human behaviour he was someone who showed us another possibility, a different model of what it is to be a human being.