pleased to report that the back is on the mend.
very hot spa baths and much alcohol and pain relief medication plus a slow down in my normally frenetic lifestyle have helped.
The bad news is I seem to have got back onto the cigarettes again after a nine year near abstinence....

meanwhile this review touched me deeply:

Preacher who is all humanity, no cant
God, Christ and Us
Herbert McCabe (ed. Brian Davies)
Continuum, £12.99
Tablet bookshop price £11.70.
The next best thing to knowing Herbert McCabe is to read him. He died in 2001, mourned as a eminent Catholic philosopher and theologian, and a great Dominican preacher and teacher. But he left behind an enormous quantity of work, including the texts of sermons and talks he gave throughout his life. He took preaching seriously; he never ad-libbed, and he wrote down what he was going to say. This material was the basis of the book, God Still Matters (playing on the title of the collection of talks that Herbert edited himself, called God Matters) which his friend and brother Dominican, Brian Davies, edited. Now he has found enough material for a volume of sermons called God, Christ and Us, which has most of the elements that were quintessentially McCabe.

Like G.K. Chesterton, who was one of his favourite authors (P.G. Wodehouse was another and so was Jane Austen), Herbert wrote with vigour and clarity and the kind of humour that makes you snort with laughter in the middle of a deadly serious subject. He also had that remarkable capacity for discussing ideas to which we are hardened by familiarity in such a way that we see them as if for the first time: the sheer scandal of the Cross, for instance; the real bodily humanity of Christ; the animal nature of all of us; the friendship that is the Trinity and our destiny to share in it; the obvious and necessary association between faith and politics; and the mortification of the flesh. There is a lovely essay on the Trinity in this volume in which he compares us with an intelligent little girl who is looking on at a delightful get-together of her parents with their friends, where she can’t quite understand what is going on, but is destined one day to share that adult life and its pleasures.

The nature of his writing, like his teaching, can be described as radical orthodoxy, or subversive tradition. In other words, he saw Catholic doctrine – God talk – as the most interesting and important subject in the world. Which, of course, it is. It is also honest thought. He is impatient with cant. Accordingly, he never talks in formulae and there are any manner of subjects where you realise, once you read him, how often we force ourselves, in a religious context, to say things that we do not really mean. Take his pronouncements on death. “There are people who will pretend to see death as quite natural, as natural as birth,” he wrote, “but I think they should look again. Human life, unlike other life, is more than a simple cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline and death; during and within this cycle there is the development of a person which is not a cycle but a continuing story that is arbitrarily cut off by death…” And for that “we are right to be angry about death…and we are right to be angry with God”.

I don’t know about you, but personally that frankness comes as a relief. Of course we get angry with God. As he says, if you think the concept of being angry with God is shocking and irreligious, then read Jeremiah, or the psalms, or Jesus on the Cross. And like Aquinas, to whom he turned instinctively, he is emphatic that we are not merely spiritual creatures. We all know people like to talk about the body as though it were something quite other than our spiritual selves. McCabe, who imbibed Aquinas’s dictum that “my soul is not me” early on, never ceases to insist that we jolly well are bodily creatures who really do die. That is why our resurrection, and Christ’s, really mean something.

But for all the fine things in the book, the sermons on prayer alone justify the price. They deal with most of the real objections to prayer that have occurred to any Christian, including the obvious one, that prayer changes God’s mind. To which McCabe’s answer is that prayer does not change God, it changes us. And his solution to the problem of distractions during prayer is perhaps my favourite. “This”, he says, “is nearly always due to praying for something you do not really much want; you just think it would be proper and respectable and ‘religious’ to want.”

So you pray high-mindedly for big but distant things like peace in Northern Ireland or you pray that your aunt will get better from the flu – when in fact these are not your most immediate concerns. Distractions are nearly always your real wants breaking in on your prayer for edifying but bogus wants. If you are distracted, trace your distraction back to the real desires it comes from and pray about these. When you are praying for what you really want you will not be distracted. People on sinking ships do not complain of distractions during their prayer.

Try it: it works. I knew Herbert, and loved him. Read his book. In it, that clipped, distinctive, compelling voice can be heard again.

In his own words ... Friendship is always with. It is always reciprocal. When Jesus consummates his friendship with the Father in his death on the cross, the Father reciprocates. And his love for this man Jesus not only brings Jesus from death to a new kind of life but brings all those whom Jesus loves to share in that resurrection and new life. So long, of course, as we abide in Jesus’ love; so long as we do not value anything else at all more than this love.
From “Jesus and Sanctity”

When Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, he was doing two things. First of all, he was expressing hospitality: these men are his guests; he invites them to share in what he has. When you invited people to eat and drink with you in Jesus’ society, the first thing you did for them as they entered was to arrange their feet to be washed. But Jesus proposes a new kind of hospitality, one in which the host is also slave and, therefore, not lord; in which the slave is also host and therefore not subservient. Here is something that is neither lordship nor servitude. Here is the meal of equals.

This washing of the feet by the one who is both lord of the feast and servant is a symbol of a new kind of relationship amongst men and women, a relationship neither of dominance nor subservience but of equality in love, a relationship in which we are equal in love to each other as Jesus and the Father are equal, a relationship in which we are one as he and the Father are one, a relationship which is the Holy Spirit.
From “Washing and Eucharist”

Faith is not first of all accepting certain truths about Jesus. It is first of all knowing who he is – which is a truth about him in a very odd sense. Faith is knowing Jesus for who he is.

It is like when you recognise a friend and say, “It’s you of course.” And then you go on to say, “Do you remember when we met in the pub? I’ll never forget how you rescued me from that terrible old bore.” Those memories are rather like the articles of faith or the story in the gospels; we use them to celebrate our recognition. We recite the creed out of our exuberance at meeting Jesus again. But the doctrine, the statements of faith, the scriptures, are nothing without the faith, the recognition of who Jesus is that they contain and express.
From “Resurrection and Epiphany”
(All extracts from God, Christ and Us)

Melanie McDonagh writing in the Tablet

oh yeah and some fluff:

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do
it himself.
A. H. Weiler

If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is
always another chance for you. What we call failure is not
the falling down but the staying down.
Mary Pickford

I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have
seen yesterday and I love today.
William Allen White