Absolutely OK Angela. Did you read the earlier post a week or two ago when Masala was first wounded? It was picked up by ethicsdaily.com and published on their features website. Hope you and Bob are well, and flourishing.

Hello Geoff - that is a beautiful piece of reflection on the essential grace of music as the deep and lucid language of all our longings. The phrase, "And Yet. And Yet" touches deeply into the place where longing and hope come close together and look forward to fulfilment. Thanks for posting this - look forward to seeing you next month.

Oops sorry Bob! I meant to add the quotation from the Preface, before I posted it - an d then forgot. And now I've left the book at College. Be Monday before I get it so hope you can wait!

Thanks Mark and Chris. I've edited the quibbled sentence Chris, you're right.

Well that's how I couldn't find you and John at the interval! Maybe catch up again before the summer is too far through Chris.

Bob, the book is jam packed as well and with extensive bibliography. I think you'll want it when you see it. As to psalm 148 - in case you haven't come across it. Terence Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament, chapter 8, 249-268 is about Nature's praise of God. Fretheim is one of my favourite OT theologians - his wee book on Jonah published decades ago is a gem. His big book on Jeremiah is profound in its theological exegesis.

Hello again Bob - Sue Gillingham's book is a wonderful gift for Psalms scholars and I'm slowly working through it with great enjoyment. You're not helping my struggles with envy telling me about your Chagall tours! On the journey home I was listening to some of John Michael Talbot's Psalm renderings.

Hi Sean - I'm up to date with my Bonhoeffer Works volumes, and while I love a bargain, I don't grudge having paid the going rate a la Amazon. A good time to be alive for Bonhoeffer scholars - I'm just a Bonhoeffer reader, but these volumes are a fitting repository for some of the most dynamic Christian theology published in our lifetime - I realise my lifetime so far is longer than yours! Hope life is good Sean, for you and your family, Jim

Hello again Bob - I fully agree that we must give over our whole character to Christ, and that discipleship because it is cruciform must always be realistic about what goes on in our own hearts. Neither I nor Boulding is suggesting we don't use all the Psalms in our praying - indeed the lengthy quotation from her offers I think a profoundly Christian way of doing precisely what you plead for, the non sanitising of an astringent text. There is I think a difference between praying the emotions of the Psalms and actually assenting and acting on those same emotions. (Brueggemann makes this important point in his Praying the Psalms. The very praying of such anger, despair, bewilderment and faith losing its bearings is what you are pleading for - a handing over of destructive reactions and responses to the one who absorbs in atoning love the sins of the world. Taking vengeance into our own hands is the precise opposite of what I (and I think Boulding) mean by allowing such authentic experience to be caught up into the reality of who Christ is, crucified and risen. For me it isn't the murder mystery that best fits the anger, outrage and bewilderment of the Psalms in question - gratuitous cruelty, the atrocities of the powerful against the vulberable, military brutality are themes also covered by contemporary film and they touch those deeper wells of emotion out of which desire for vengeance and the will to retaliatory violence comes. I think we are both arguing for an honest and unedited indeed unexpurgated Psalter as the prayer book of the Church. For myself, it is precisely the imprecatory psalms, and the psalms of invective and shame, that give language to our prayers so that we say Thy will be done insxtead of my will be done. And it requires the transforming grace of the living Christ, the cleansing fire of the Holy Spirit, and the forgiving love of the Father of mercies for such a spiritual aclhemy to take place, so that vengeance becomes conciliation and peace displaces violence. But this is a good discussion and I'm happy to keep it open for a bit yet.

Apologies to Chris and Bob for the delay in posting their comments. Been on holiday and been busy - not an oxymoron just the way life is. Bob, as always your comment makes me think again - but if we believe the Psalmists spoke with utter frankness to God, then vengeance and grief, anger and despair would be part of the genuine experience of people of faith facing life's extremities. The collisions of emotional and theological responses within the collection of Psalms is what makes them the prayer book of the human heart, and also enables such prayers to be an honest and authentic cry of faith whether struggling or celebrating, questioning or affirming. But yes, any reading of the Sermon on the Mount, and serious reflection on the pivotal event of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself, making peace by the blood of the cross, requires of us the responses of those who are ministers of reconciliation. The eucharistic cup, of anguished suffering and suffering love, of shared faith and holy communion, itself holds together the polar extremes of human experience and the infinite range of Divine love and peacemaking.

Thank you Dr Goroncy. (and Chris pointed out another howler :) My point made perfectly! I can't even claim a neologism with 'lanaguage', but thanks for your encouragement and warm words. All corrected now - And Ill try to do gooder :))

Hello Chris - now there's a good place to meet for coffee. Art, coffee, conversation, a trinity of comforts. How about February?

Agreed Tony - I need more than one hymn as I think Advent expresses different moods of longing, hopefulness and yearning for peace and life. Like you Ruth, I too need something that silences my needfulness and insists I shut up and let God be God. And Chris, I guess the words express a fuller theology than our Christmas can contain. Happy Christmas to each of you and thanks for your interest and occasional comments here. Veni Emmanuel.

Hello Spirituality - or is it hilarity:) Click on the painting and elnarge it. You'll see to the left of the pillar a small dove within the beam of light, and from the cloud a hand in the gesture of giving. You have indeed been watching too much Star Trek. This is Renaissance symbolism, theology in pictures, a page of high art in graphic novel form. Almost all early portrayals of the Annunciation have a beam of light, a dove, and the Virgin in the attitude of prayer. So I guess it's the redeeming touch of God on all our lives! Thanks for calling by and for the question - sorry about the didactic answer, but it is the right one!

Chris that's a wonderful Advent Gift - both to you, and from you to the Church. I hope it brings you and the congregation hopeful joy. And before I order my zimmer, it would be good to meet for that long anticipated coffee, itself a metaphor for Advent waiting:) More seriously, the shalom of the Prince of Peace surround us all.

Aye, Sean - they don't write commentaries like Barrett's John anymore. I know scholarship moves on, and ways of learning and researching change, but like Lightfoot's commentaries, Barrett on John and Cranfield on Romans remain wonderful works of godliness and good learning - and all of them associated with Durham. Hope you are well and flourishing in your antipodean mission context :)

Hi Jerry - thanks for the comment. No I haven't read Peterson's volume on Ephesians - his Reversed Thunder on Revelation is I think the best thing he has done. Should have included in my list the excellent Rudolph Schnackenburg's commentary. Now there's a name to quote! - but it is a profound commentary I once took on retreat with me and soaked in it.

Hello Bob - I agree that the Psalms have much to say on reconciliation, as it has about enemies, vengeance and the longing for peace. And yes, Jesus learned from the Psalms - but also his manifesto came from isaiah who I think is also deeply pervasive in the words and ideas of Jesus. Good to hear from you again - hope your work goes well.

Thanks for the comments Poetreehugger and Perpetua. I was pleased and surprised Goudge was quoted in an academic treatment of love and human identity! She would have been pleased too!!

Hello again Cynthia. Thanks for another kind comment. Hope life is good for you just now. Hi Jason,I read Smoke on the Mountain years ago and it was the best thing around on the Ten Commandments - not sure what has superceded it as a serious engagement with the ethical imperatives of faith understood as the demands of grace. As one from a Jewish, Marxist background, skilled in literary criticism and a good writer, with an eagle eye for ethical integrity and incurable impatience with intellectual sloppiness, she wrote as a Christian out of rich experience, and a strong aversion to the moral climate of her own time and national context. Just glanced through her treatment of the 7th Commandment - and confirmed what I said above! Smoke on the Mountain is online at http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/davidman/smoke/smoke.c.htm