Andrew A. Bonar and Jonathan Sacks

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading the Diary of Andrew A. Bonar (1810-1892) the notable Scottish Free Churchman whose bi-centenary is celebrated this year. The resulting Christian Viewpoint column I wrote for the Highland News was a ‘soft’ piece, focussing not so much on Bonar’s theology, as on noting some of the images from everyday life which he used to illuminate the spiritual dimension. I guess for me symbols and imagery have always spoken more powerfully than ideas, I did note in passing however that Bonar’s life which, for all its seriousness seems to have been joy- and love-filled belies the stereotype of Calvinists as stern zealots.

Sometimes the diaries irritated me, and I felt an instant guilt at being irritated by someone who was patently such a godly person. But when you see him worrying that his kids, having innocent fun on holiday, might temporarily take their eyes off God you do feel like telling him to ‘get a life.’ And mixed with his joy in God’s presence were times of utter dejection when he was plagued with a sense of his failure. I guess it is true that the closer to God you are the more you’re aware of your shortcomings. But isn’t it also true that closeness to God is a constant reminder of his grace and acceptance in Christ, so that the mist of dejection at your failure is quickly burned up by the rising sun of his embracing love?

At other times, however, I was deeply blessed by Bonar’s words. I recall particularly a trip to Stirling back in April when I read the Diary for much of the way down from Inverness and then, in the afternoon, sat for an hour on the station in the bright spring sunshine immersed in Bonar as trains came and went. I was flooded with joy and peace and hope and certainty, the whisper of God. Interesting that you can be so blessed through the words of someone with whom there would no doubt be many issues on which you don’t see eye-to-eye.

I realised about ten years ago that I was a ‘complicated evangelical’ when I came to accept that for me, the old ‘evangelical paradigm’ didn’t satisfactorily explain all the issues I had, and that it was OK to embrace a bigger, more scary paradigm which involved living with mystery and unanswered questions and less dogmatism.

But then I read someone like Andrew Bonar, so prayerful, so aware of God – and so convinced that the paradigm of his essentially Calvinist take on truth is substantially accurate, and once again I feel challenges and unsettled. Are folks like Bonar right? Should I turn back to the old evangelical paradigm with its focus more on certainties than on unknowing?

Last Saturday I saw Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writing, movingly as he often does, in The Times. His subject was his own discovery of God, and he noted though a holy book and a holy land had contributed to his spiritual growth, mostly ‘I found God in people.’ He quotes a story by Jorge Luis Borges in which ‘he imagines someone coming across a stranger who has something about him – an unlikely tenderness, an exaltation – that doesn’t belong, that seems to be a reflection of someone else.’ Borges writes ‘Somewhere in the world there is a man from whom this clarity, this brightness, emanates.’

Says Sacks ‘He searches for this mysterious presence entirely by following his reflection in others. That is how I have searched for God. And that is where I have found Him, in holy people and ordinary people, in lives lifted beyond themselves, in serene grace and holy argument, in acts of quiet courage and improbably recconciliation, in gentle wisdom and soaring imagination, in forgiving eyes and gestures of love.’

As Christians, would we not say that it is from Jesus that ‘this clarity, this brightness, emanates,’ and that we see in one another as Christians glimpses of his radiance? But what do we make of Sack’s assertion that we can catch glimpses of the Source in many good people – by implication of difference faiths and none? Is it true that glimpses of God can be seen in all of us? Are these reflected glories simply residual insights from our source in God, or is God present in the everyday goodnesses of all women and men regardless of their beliefs? And if people have actively sought these goodnesses in dependence on strength from beyond themselves will God reject them because they have not had faith in Christ? And how much do I, who claim to know so much about Christian theology, reflect the Source in my everyday life?

It’s questions like these, which won’t go away, which make me uncomfortable with the austere joy of Bonar’s paradigm, much as I acknowledge his saintliness and outstanding faith.

One image he used (on 28th January 1877) particularly struck me. ‘Today,’ he wrote, ‘I was like a man standing in full sight of plenty at the door of a well-stored granary, all of it mine; but I took little of it.’ It’s true how little we sometimes appreciate and appropriate of God’s goodness to us. But I also thought that that there were things in that granary which Bonar didn’t realise were there perhaps because his theology denied them reality. Bonar hungered for the Holy Spirit and yet he does not seem to have had an insight into the present reality of the gifts of the Spirit which some 20th century Christians were to rediscover. For us, too in the 21st century there will be treasures in that granary which we don’t yet know are there.

The ideal day

Another tough day at work lies ahead, with problems that I'm not sure how to resolve. An encouragement to think that, if God is truly sovereign, then each day there is an ideal path for me to take, an ideal way for me to live and react, and the challenge of faith is, with God's grace to find and take that path and live that way. In response to this encouragement, I might wonder if it is possibly true, since we bring into each day so much baggage from the past. And yet, if God is truly sovereign, then surely he gives us each morning as a gift, fresh and new, the consequences of our mistakes from the past somehow redeemed and woven into the texture of present possibilities. So today - how close will I come to the ideal? A starting point is to trust that God knows the answers to problems from yesterday - and the answers to today's problems of which I am not yet even aware.

e4libraries Award

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Here I am with Bill Fernie, Chair of the Highland Council's Education Culture and Sport Committee and the certificate of accreditation we received from Book Industry Communication's e4Libraries Project. Highland Libraries is the first Library Service in Scotland to receive this accreditation, which recognises success in implmenting new technologies. See the press release here.

Lessons from Florence Nightingale

Who hasn’t heard of Florence Nightingale, who worked tirelessly to improve conditions at the military hospital at Scutari during the Crimean War? Who hasn’t heard of the quality of personal care she gave the wounded soldiers, and of her legendary evening visits to their bedsides, the ‘Lady with the Lamp’?

This year sees the centenary of Nightingale’s death, and last Wednesday, her birthday, a chapel was dedicated to her at Westminster Abbey. It’s the first time a chapel there has been named after someone not either a member of the royal family or a saint.

In recent weeks, various writers have described Florence Nightingale as a ‘secular saint’. But is that not a contradiction in terms: isn’t a ‘saint’ by definition someone dedicated to God?

If by calling Nightingale a ‘secular saint’ people mean that she was an outstanding person with no Christian faith, then they are wide of the mark. For she was unquestionably a believer. Born in 1820 to affluent parents, she was brought up as an Anglican. She describes being ‘converted’ in her mid-teens, and on 7th February 1837 received what she described as ‘a call to service’ from God.

Nightingale believed that each of us is loved with ‘the infinite love of the most high God.’ Her faith was Jesus-centred - ‘Personal union with Jesus Christ: without this we are nothing,’ she wrote. And she saw herself standing before God after death, ‘utterly dependent on God’s providence alone and not…anything of my own at all.’

Her beliefs were not entirely orthodox – she couldn’t, for example, accept that the love of God would not eventually persuade all his enemies to turn to him, and so did not believe in hell. But there is no questioning the authenticity of her faith.

I suppose by ‘secular saint’ people could mean a Christian who lives out their vocation in the everyday world. This was certainly true of Florence Nightingale, and we can learn from her example. For we all have a ‘vocation’: the word has come to mean simply a ‘job’, but originally it described a call from God to make a difference, to build God’s kingdom. Nightingale’s call took her to Scutari, and motivated her later campaigning from her sickbed to improve the Army Medical Service, and to influence hospital design, public sanitation projects, and the status and training of nurses.

She regarded Christians as ‘fellow workers with God.’ His plan is to bring everything to perfection, and our vocation, as we’d put it today, is to reflect in the present the values of the coming kingdom. Nightingale wrote ‘It is because it is God’s plan to be completed in God’s eternity that I work at all.’

She believed in the need for the Holy Spirit’s presence. ‘O God’, she prayed, ‘Give me Thy Holy Spirit (twenty times a day) to convince me of sin, of righteousness, above all to give me love, a real individual love for everyone.’

Yet she saw working for God as a matter of discovering the rules God has put in place governing all aspects of his creation – including health, sanitation and social welfare – and work along with these laws to bring improvement. In this we feel she was missing something. She regarded God’s laws as unchanging, and did not seem to acknowledge that the God who made the rules might choose to work outside the rules, that the Holy Spirit can work miracles.
She was a saint working in the everyday world. But really, does that make her a secular saint? Wasn’t her whole point that for the saint, nothing in creation is ‘secular’, for God has an interest in it all?

But the words ‘secular saint’ could conceivably refer to someone whose goodness is recognised by people who do not share their faith. This was certainly the case with Florence Nightingale. In this sense, we’re all called to be secular saints, bearing in us the lamp of God’s truth and of God’s healing presence, and bringing others within the circle of its light.

Florence Nightingale once said that the whole of religion was summed up in two four-word phrases from the version of the Bible she used. A boy says to God ‘Here am I, Lord.’ Jesus comforts his disciples by coming to them during a storm and saying ‘Lo it is I.’ And so at the birth of our faith and ever afterwards, Jesus comes to us in our fear, and we respond.

Nightingale wrote that often she would say ‘Here am I, Lord,’ and think she had to do everything herself, forgetting that he journeys with us. And we too forget that the strength of God’s presence comes to us in our weakness, as he says with commanding reassurance ‘Lo it is I.’

(My column in the Highland News, dated 22nd May 2010)