Songs of the dawn, hymns
of the morning, chanticlere voices of the new day, have
a determined, assertive quality, a direction, an
irresistible current that sweeps us out of the darkness
and into the light. The new-born day, like a new-born
child, emerges from mystery and oblivion into
consciousness - a glorious awareness of the
multitudinous universe, - rich in promise and
undiscovered possibilities, a terra incognita, ripe for
exploration.
These hymn-writers are an
energetic lot; they are up-and-doing folk, who yank us
awake, bundle us into the sunlight and drive us onwards,
shouting, "Forward! Forward!"
Bid then farewell to sleep;
Rise up and run!
Shake off dull sloth, and joyful rise
Why are we thus thrust
from slumber to opened-eyed awakefulness so
peremptorily? "Look around you," they say.
"Behold your world!" Their enthusiasm will not
be denied. "Beauty is everywhere about you"
Mine is the sunlight!
Mine is the morning!
Birds above us fly,
Flowers bloom below.
Grey wakes to green again
Beauty is seen again
Gold and serene again...
While they urge our limbs
across the lawns of the morning, they are arousing the
spirit within.
Awake my soul, and with the sun
Thy daily stage of duty run:
They are committed to the power of
positive thinking.
The soul hath lifted moments
Above the drift of days,
With life's great meaning breaking
In sunrise on our ways.
So, o'er the hills of life,
Stormy forlorn,
Out of the cloud and strife
Sunrise is born.
They may come across as
'a cold-shower-every-morning, pull-yourself-together'
lot, but they have a point. An optimistic appraisal of
the day ahead, an awareness of beauty and blessing as
well as blight, is a wholesome way to confront the dawn
of a new day,...and a New Year. All the best for 2008.
The past and future ever meet
In the eternal now;
To make each day a thing complete
Shall be our New Year vow.
Wm. S. Stephen (Editor)
Tel. 01224 -317450.
Email: william134@btinternet.com
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YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS
We present an evening of
nostalgia, recalling the music, songs sights and sounds
of W.W.2. on Friday 15th February at 7.30pm. The music
will be provided by the B. B. Memorial Band and Serenata.
A power-point presentation of contemporary photographs
and sound recordings will remind us of what was
happening to the City and people of Aberdeen and of the
North East during those years of conflict. An exhibition
of various object de vertue of the period will
also bring back a few memories. Refreshments will be
served......these will NOT include snoek sandwiches!,
spam fritters, powdered - egg omelets and dried-milk
shakes. Strictly 2008 goodies! Tickets £4.00 are on
sale now.
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QUIZ NIGHT
Several years ago as part
of our fund-raising effort we organised a very
successful Quiz Night. Our funds again being in need of
a fillip, we are repeating the exercise. In the hope of
a vastly increased attendance we have booked the
Transport Club (pay-bar included) for Friday 7th March,
at 7.30pm. for another QUIZ NIGHT! The plan is to have
teams of four participating to answer questions on
general, local and contemporary knowledge etc. In
addition to ancillary brainteasers and puzzles, there
will also be a special Fair Trade Quiz. A stovies,
oatcakes and beetroot supper will be served. Tea and
biscuits will also be available. There will be a raffle
and of course prizes for winners and runners-up of the
various games. Please join in the fun. Tickets at £5.00
per person are now available.
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ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
The Annual General
Meeting of our Congregation will be held on Sunday 16th
March 2008 at 10.30am. The Annual Report and Accounts
will be distributed with the March 2008 Calendar. The
Nomination meeting to receive names of candidates for
the vacant places on the Committee will take place after
the Service on Sunday 2nd March 2008.
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MINISTER'S FEBRUARY VISIT. CHANGE OF DATE.
Please note that the Rev.
Cal Courtney will be with us during the last weekend in
February. This is due to a collision of obligations on
February 8th, 9th & 10th. when he would normally be
present in Aberdeen.
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PASTORAL GREETINGS
We wish to send greetings
to all our house-bound and infirm members. You are
always in our mind and we remain deeply concerned and
caring about your welfare. If you would like our
Minister to visit you or would like to chat to a few of
your fellow members please let us know.
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LETTERS FROM AMERICA
Over the Christmas period
we received several letters from our American
friends.
Rev. Jay Deacon
has bad a very busy and productive year. He is currently
interim minister at Unity Church, North Easton, in
south-east Massachusetts, a nineteenth century
architectural gem which possesses two of the finest
stained glass windows in the U.S. Jay has recently
completed the manuscript of a book he hopes to publish
very soon and has also presented a regular Thursday
afternoon programme, entitled 'Spirit' on community
radio, featuring a sermon, music and political
commentary.
Some of these programmes
are available on his website, http://www.jaydeacon.net.
He participated in a retreat in the Berdshire Hills
(U.S.A.) and has become interested in 'evolutionary
enlightenment'. He is enjoying good health and is
looking forward to finding a permanent ministry in the
Cambridge, Massachusetts area.
Sally Stearns, Ray,
Erica and Rachel Thomas have had a very good
year. Rachel and Erica, now teenagers, are attending
High School and are looking forward to learning to drive
in the coming year. Erica has developed a interest in
hockey and Rachel has taken up dancing. Ray is engaged
in various house improvement projects and has just
completed a 'rock path' by the side of the house. The
highlight of their year was an adventure holiday in
Grand Canyon National Park. They were camping among
rattle snakes, white-water-rafting, climbing up the
canyon walls, living on a houseboat at Lake Powell where
they met some Aberdeen friends.
Dick and Audrey
Vincent are enjoying life in Sunny California.
Dick at 86 is not quite as active as be once was. He
enjoys his garden, reads a great deal, attends meetings
of the Democratic Club and the Church discussion group.
Audrey also likes to
read, tend to the roses Dick planted years ago and enjoy
the blue sky and bright sunshine of California. She had
also spent a weekend with her former congregation in
Savannah to participate in the installation of her
successor and enjoyed a mini-holiday with an old girl
friend at Key West.
We also heard from Jim
Brown who is still prospecting for oil and
seeing as much of the world as he can.
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WOMEN'S
LEAGUE PROGRAMME
FEBRUARY 2008
| 6th |
Arrangements
for the League's 100th Birthday Party |
| 13th |
Arthur
Bruce Entertains |
| 20th |
Gentle Exercise |
Doreen Munro |
| 27th |
"The Eden
Project" |
Projected by Bill
Stephen |
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DE PROFUNDIS
During the spring of
1897, Oscar Wilde, prior to his release from Reading
gaol, where he was serving a two years hard-labour
sentence for homosexual practices, wrote a long letter
to his erstwhile lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, who had
ignored him ever since the court case that condemned him
to imprisonment and ignominy. This letter was eventually
published in its entirety, some 120 pages, in 1962,
under the title bestowed upon it by Robert Ross, Wilde's
literary executor, "De Profnndis", the opening
words of Psalm 130, one of the seven penitential psalms,
'From the very depths, I call to you, Lord'. One can but
admire Ross's sensitivity and understanding in selecting
such an apt title for a work by an author crushed by
humiliation and shame but determined to find some
positive meaning in the life he was enduring. The
psalmist knows that God accepts him as he is, weak,
rejected, emotionally wounded and in despair, seeking
justification for his fate, and this knowledge gives him
the strength to combat the anguish that assails him.
Oscar Wilde's circumstances, physical, emotional and
spiritual, apart from one very significant aspect with
which we must deal later, seem to coincide with those of
the poet who wrote:
'From the very depths, I call
to you. Lord.
Lord, hear my prayer.
Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my plea
for help.
If you, Lord, take note of our wrong-doings, who
can survive?
But it is your nature to forgive; therefore are
you held in awe.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits for him and in
his word I put my trust.
My soul waits for the Lord more than the watchmen
look for the morning.
Trust in the Lord, 0 Israel, for with the Lord is
unfailing love, and great is his power to deliver.
He alone can deliver Israel from all their
wrong-doings. ' * |
Wilde's 'De Profundis' is
one of the finest of the great 19th century
autobiographies. It is deeply, even painfully personal.
Every mood, feeling, thought, impression, hope and fear,
every one, is laid bare; his inconsistency, his
volatility, his spontaneity along with his brilliance
are all intimately exposed. This is a work about Oscar
Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, with the
Authorities which incarcerated him, with friends and
acquaintances, but most of all, his relationship with
himself. This is a work by Oscar Wilde about Oscar
Wilde, charting a spiritual journey from despair towards
deliverance, a destination at which he admits he never
arrives.
In 1895, Oscar Wilde was
convicted of indulging in homosexual practices and
imprisoned first in Wandsworth Scrubs and then in
Reading gaol. For more than a decade he had been the
most brilliant member of the intellectual and artistic
community in London, an outstanding critic, playwright,
novelist and essayist, a leader of fashion and arbiter
of taste, renowned for his learning, conversation, his
devastating wit, his style, his charm and social graces.
His opinion was sought on all matters literary and
artistic and in the opinion of many including himself,
he was the genius of the age, a living legend, in whose
company it was the ambition of every rising young
writer, artist, socialite, to be seen. His fall from
pedestal to pillory, from pinnacle to pit was sudden,
and irreversible. Apart from a tiny handful of close
friends, all his acquaintances abandoned him and the
mob, encountering him handcuffed and in prison garb,
jeered at him in the street His wife divorced him; the
state forbade him any contact with his two young sons;
he was declared a bankrupt; he was refused permission to
attend his mother's funeral, an official cruelty he
found particularly hard to bear; and of course he was
physically and temperamentally ill suited to prison life
which undermined his health and hastened his early death
less than three years after his release.
The opening pages of 'De
Profundis' are steeped in bitterness and anger, emotions
that, try as he may, he is never quite able to cast off,
even by the end. He has been stigmatised by a society
which chooses not to comprehend his artistic
temperament. He repudiates any suggestion of having
committed a crime or of feeling any sense of guilt for
what he has been imprisoned, but regards himself as a
martyr, condemned to misery by hypocrisy and
narrow-mindedness, for an act that is widely practised
in secret, but reviled in public by many who participate
in it. 'The love that dare not speak its name', as Wilde
himself satirically defined it. In his martyrdom, he
finds nothing heroic but only what is mean, sordid,
squalid and commonplace. His situation may be tragic,
but he says he is nevertheless a figure of ridicule and
scorn, not taken seriously by society or the community
at large. While reproaching Alfred Douglas for his role
in his downfall, he accepts that he allowed his
infatuation for this attractive but disturbed young man
to dominate him in every way and so must accept
responsibility for his own undoing.
Anger, bitterness,
resentment, despair, however, are not fit companions for
such as he, contemplating his return to freedom and the
resumption of his literary career. If it is not to be
wasted, his two years incarceration must yield something
positive, in terms of self-knowledge, an improved
understanding of the human spirit and even in some
artistic production, which will transform the ugliness
of the prison experience into something beautiful and
rare that humanity will find life-enhancing and
awe-inspiring.
Suffering is his via
dolorosa, his bitter road, to spiritual enlightenment.
Suffering has become his way of life. Every waking hour
his mind is twisted and wrenched
with destructive thoughts that only exacerbates his
misery. In an effort to find peace of mind, he tries to
teach himself acceptance. He must humble himself,
surrender without rancour to the greater power of the
system and reconcile himself to the fact that he is
being punished. He digs deep inside himself and to his
surprise discovers that his spiritual life has all this
while been evolving. A sudden insight tells him that,
suffering hand in hand with sorrow, shows humankind at
its best. Suffering has led him to humility, that is to
an acknowledgement of his own weakness, his own
inadequacies and vulnerability. After all, he is not a
god, possessed of miraculous powers. He is not a noble
hero is some great poetic drama, Oedipus or Hamlet. He
is just as any other man you might pass in the street,
nondescript, unremarkable, nameless. He can no longer
evade the fact that he is daily on his knees scrubbing
out his cell, wearing coarse prison uniform, performing
meaningless physical tasks far beyond his strength,
humiliated hourly by his surroundings and regarded in
the sophisticated drawing rooms of London as a moral and
spiritual degenerate. He has lost everything; he is at
rock bottom. The only emotion left to him is humility.
He becomes convinced that suffering is endemic
world-wide and that sooner or later it afflicts every
single person, irrespective of race or class. On his
realising this, his whole being is overwhelmed by a
feeling of unfathomable sorrow, and sorrow is the
inevitable consequence of love. Suffering, he claims, is
beautiful. It can transform the past into something
meaningful and worthwhile. It transforms his erstwhile
indifference to the troubles of other people into
understanding and compassion, a spiritual alchemy which
fills him with awe and profound gratitude that the
experience of imprisonment has conferred upon him such a
boon. Sorrow for the human condition, its trials and
tribulations, its tragedies and catastrophes, sorrow,
unselfish and uncalculating, enlists him in the ranks of
the down-trodden and the despised. An ability to feel at
one with the sorrowing world is as close as any of us
get to approaching God. Henceforth his relationships
with other people and his writing in particular would
exhibit a level of sincerity and sensitivity that he
could never have imagined possessing. Sorrow permeated
his whole being, characterising not only his mental
state but also his physical appearance. He looks at
himself and he sees in every gesture a human being in
distress. Sorrow is the one emotion that cannot be
concealed nor counterfeited. A sorrowful spirit will be
revealed in a sorrowing body, achieving the ideal of all
artistic endeavour, the perfect union of body and soul.
He is sorrow incarnate. He has achieved the perfect form
of expression. What he is, is what he feels and what he
shows.
These insights draw from
the author an important conclusion. He had achieved this
all on his own. Traditional religious practice had been
of no help whatsoever. His spiritual regeneration had
been achieved from within. By reflecting upon his own
situation, he had brought about his own change of heart.
Humility being the only thing he could now call his own,
being his only possession, was his only thing of value.
Humility gave his life meaning since it emerged
genuinely from his own experience and his own spirit.
Enlightenment is a very personal achievement,
the result of intense reflection upon personal
experience and one's sincere reaction to that
experience. It cannot be taught; it cannot be reduced to
a formula or system or frozen into a monolithic
orthodoxy or tradition. It is alive, spontaneous,
multiform, rejoicing in individuality, and responding to
life. Jesus, he claims, is the supreme example of this
individuality. He rebelled against the religious
bureaucrats. He scorned their conventions and legalistic
attitudes. The spirit, not the text or the ritual or the
formula, is the seat of whatever is divine in the
individual human being. Such is the message we receive
from Jesus of Nazareth.
For himself, as an
individual, then, beyond the reach of organised
religion, he seems to suggest that the ultimate reality
is suffering. He quotes the poet William Wordsworth:
" Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark and has
the nature of infinity". Presumably he means that
suffering, whether physical or mental, claims our
immediate attention. It tends to take priority over
other concerns. Pain may be treated or it may be
endured, but it cannot be ignored. Therefore, it is
there, a recurring problem to be coped with. Many people
may rise above it, even perhaps, like Oscar Wilde feel
they have learned something from it. 'Suffering', it has
been said, often enough, 'is good for the soul'. Others
find it an enormous burden that makes a mockery of their
existence, yet they endure it. Others find it quite
unbearable and it destroys them. None of us wishes to
suffer and suffering is generally regarded as
destructive of human life and happiness. Acts of cruelty
intended to cause suffering to any living creature are
regarded with horror by most people. Traditional
Christians are expected to be eternally grateful that
Jesus voluntarily embraced the torture of crucifixion to
redeem them of their sins, redemption through pain, an
act of martyrdom that in its time was unique, but has
been repeated many times since by religious zealots of
various religions, wishing to demonstrate their
commitment to their faith or cause.
Suffering, nonetheless
remains Oscar Wilde's reality because he has been unable
to resolve another major human dilemma, exacerbated by
his staunch individuality. He has travelled a long way
on this spiritual journey. He has tried to leave hatred,
bitterness, resentment, rancour, self-pity far behind
but the ultimate goal of peace of mind, acceptance of
himself, is still a speck on the horizon. He was unable
to forgive himself. In an earlier portion of the book,
he says he is prepared to forgive Lord Alfred Douglas
for his part in his downfall, but, although he raises
the question, never discusses his attitude to
self-forgiveness. Elsewhere he claims that no-one is
ever worthy of being loved and should not expect to be
loved. He adds that anyone who thinks he or she ought to
be loved, certainly is not deserving of love.
Forgiveness is an aspect of love and it may be argued
that in view of these remarks, he has difficulty loving
and, therefore, forgiving himself.
The poet of psalm 130,
like Wilde is in deep despair, but unlike Wilde,
believes that ultimate reality is a loving and forgiving
God, who will relieve him of his crushing sense of guilt
and so end his suffering. Wilde has no such resource. If
he cannot forgive himself, who can? He has encountered,
the problem that is familiar to everyone who assumes
total responsibility for his or her spiritual
well-being. Complete Spiritual self-sufficiency is
probably unachievable. There remains a longing to be
valued by a benign presence that is beyond the reach of
human reason and is perceived instinctively, if at all.
Wilde acknowledges this. Dreaming of the beauty of early
Summer that will greet him upon his release, he writes,
, I am conscious now that behind all beauty, there is
some spirit hidden.....and it is with this spirit that I
desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the
articulate utterances of men and of things. The mystical
in Art, the Mystical in life, the mystical in Nature -
this is what I am looking for, .....and in music, in the
initiation of Sorrow, in the depths of the sea I may
find it. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it.'
The 'De Profundis' psalm is a work of Faith: "Trust
in the Lord, 0 Israel, for with the Lord is unfailing
love and great is his power is as he admit to
deliver." Oscar Wilde's 'De Profundis' is a work of
aspiration and hope rather than certainty, but as such
it is of immense value to thoughtful people of our own
time, in that it reflects many aspects of our own
experience as we try to find a way towards spiritual
enlightenment and fulfilment.
* Translated by John
Rogerson & quoted in his book 'Psalms in Daily Life
'.
