Humanity

In today’s world of rapid communication we can learn, almost at once, of the needs and plight of others anywhere on the planet.
We are made aware of, and are able to hear witnesses’ accounts of events, while simultaneously viewing images of situations and the aftermath of those events in even the most remote places; and, to all intents and purposes, this can be done almost as soon as the events occur. Whether this be through the headline subjects on national and international news, or, in the case of less “newsworthy” happenings, through the more focussed consciousness of the organizations and individuals who strive for whatever may be lacking in the lives of those for whom they speak and act, for the most part we remain sadly and shockingly unaware of the reality of those needs, even those we have seen so clearly on television.

If we have no particular interest in other places, other cultures, other peoples, nor in specific needs whether famine, cancer, Aids, blindness, land-mines, the aged, orphans, third-world debt, street-children, the homeless, refugees, the unborn child - the list is far longer than any of us could comprehend – then our television screen is not only the front line for our awareness, but is in danger of actually becoming our awareness. We watch: we see the images and we hear the sounds: we listen to the witness accounts, the commentaries and the discussions. We may feel shocked, upset, angry or sad while we are being led into and through whatever the situation or event may be, but it is only when and where such happenings are reported that we have even a glimpse of these things; and it is only when we have these glimpses that we feel our responses.
When the reporting switches to other news items, it is over: the images gone, the feelings gone, the awareness gone.
We have not even touched the reality of what we have seen, and the mental page-turning carries on without anything raising more than a momentary flicker in our comparatively untroubled lives. We recline in a soporific approximation to the communal spirit inherent in our being man-and-woman-kind.

Individually we are human beings - in and of itself a potential the fullness of which is clearly beyond the realization of many people, and exceeding most of our imaginings - but it is only when we function together that the full meaning of being human can begin to be understood.
More than this, it is only when we learn, as individuals, who we are meant to be, and have moved towards a life as our true selves, that our coming together can begin to manifest the full reality of our potential: the collaborative magnificence and harmony of our individual giftedness.
Only then can we begin to describe ourselves collectively as being truly as our Creator intended: - Humanity.

We have a long way to go.
We wallow in a form of quiet that we interpret as peace; we are physically, mentally and emotionally at rest: we are untroubled, and untroubled is how we wish to remain. We believe that if everyone would only lay back quietly into this non-judgmental and confrontation-free attitude, we would all be able to get on with our lives without being overly concerned about problems not directly touching ourselves. But this is not how we are meant to be.
Getting on with our lives is not what we are here for.
We are here to live. We are here to live life to the full; and that cannot be done without first awakening and nurturing the Spirit within.
Far from being a prompt to get out there and enjoy a selfish and wasteful life, it is an expression of our need to discover those things of which we are capable, but of which we shall otherwise remain forever unaware.
It is a call to wake up: to be alive to the ultimate challenge: - to find, take possession of, and become the persons we were born to be.

Turmoil may billow through our journeys, and our paths may be littered with doubt, failure, temptation and falls. Unhappiness, uncertainty, unrest and unease may lead us towards disillusionment, depression and denial, but through all that comes our way, and through the faith that grows from perseverance, we shall sense the underlying and unwavering constant: a sense of quiet that holds out the promise of reassurance and the holding at bay of all deeper fears, while pulsing through us a belief that all will come right in the end.

As Jesus said to Julian of Norwich,
...........................................“… all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” (Revelations of Divine Love.)

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Held apart

In Romans 12:20-21, we are told, ‘If your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat; if thirsty, something to drink. By this, you will be heaping red hot coals on his head. Do not be mastered by evil, but master evil with good.’

Let that always be our aim, but in those rare times when all such offering of love and compassion is rejected, and when contact undermines or destroys our equilibrium and our ability to discern God’s will, let us not take this to be an instruction to maintain the status quo.
We are not called to be present to all people at all times.
We are not called to be present to every person at every moment.
We are called to love all people, including our enemies, and not to judge them; to hate their sin as we must hate our own, but always to love them, and, ‘as much as is possible, and to the utmost of your ability, be at peace with everyone.’ ( Romans 12:18)

'Bless your persecutors; never curse them , bless them.’ (Romans 12:14)

There are those with whom we may find it impossible to be at peace, and, with evil and goodness hating each other equally, we must not prolong our presence in their company beyond necessity; indeed, if there is no necessity there should be no presence, and the passage of time should not be allowed to weaken our resolve in this.
Just as we may find some people to be playing essential parts in our journey - those who are God’s provision for us - so we must learn to recognize those whose presence, or whose words or actions, influence us in ways that bring about the weakening or the dismembering of our faith. The dismantling of our growing strength can be begun by the smallest of angers, or ill wishes, or frustrations, and there may be those whose presence in our lives, however distant or infrequent the contact, bring about such loosening of the stones beneath our feet.
This loosening may be so subtle that it does not result in any conscious reversal, or retreat, or withdrawal from our calling, but we only need to be delayed for a while, to be distracted, disturbed, or to be held back, for them to have achieved their end.
Any small reduction in a perceived goodness in us reduces the contrast between us, and helps them in maintaining their self-image.

It is an essential requirement of spiritual peace, and of the inner strength and stability which the Holy Spirit builds within us, that we learn to exclude the influence of these people from our lives. We have to ensure that we make no move to accommodate their attitudes or mindsets within our own lives or the lives of others. Any determination on their part to maintain their abrasive, offensive, or even abusive contact will make this very difficult, and will certainly result in increased aggravation, and even a long running battle, but be assured, if evil is at work to prevent us achieving our goal as the persons we are called to be, it will not easily be made to let go.
If that is truly what we strive for, evil has good reason to drag us down and to prevent the empowering of the goodness within us.
Evil has reason to fear each one of us.
And let us never forget our need to fear the consequences of sliding into the false promise of peace offered by compromise.
The apparent deepening of the chasm between us and such people is, in reality, a clarification of the incompatibility of our spiritual lives. Making no space available for their ways of thinking and of being, may involve making no place for their physical presence either.
Complete exclusion may be impossible, for example in the case of family members who will be met at gatherings, be this only at christenings, weddings and funerals. Yes, such situations come very close to home for some people, and in such cases, how little the powers of evil may need to exert themselves to achieve their aims.

Most of us, thank God, will not have any such person in our lives, but for some people such situations are very real, and for the most part completely hidden from others; they may be highly abusive relationships from which there is no visible exit.
Through the influence of their enemies – for that is what they are – their daily lives are laid out along the very edge of a precipice, but unlike the advancing, beckoning and mystical edges along our spiritual paths, where God’s presence draws us ever onwards, closer to and then beyond the edge, this is an abrasive and dark force which drives them towards further depths of unrest and despair.
God’s presence is in the solid ground beneath us, away from this edge, and as soon as they turn towards Him his waiting arms will enfold them in absolute safety.
Let us pray for those who know well the war waged in such situations, that through their faith, trust and discernment of the way ahead, they may be led safely into the spiritual peace that is their birthright.

As with the early stages of grief, we are not able to have that peace when we are in any state of upset, turmoil or distraction resulting from trying to accommodate such people.
Only when we can allow emptiness to be itself, and to remain unfilled until flooded with nothing but the presence, the love and the peace of God, will we be able to settle in that all-encompassing and productive quiet which is spiritual peace. This cannot begin to live in us, and nor can we live in it, while we are not in a position to be at peace in our hearts. This in its turn is not achievable while we are not at peace within our minds, and even the start-point for that – a physical peace in our bodies and in our physical lives – must remain unruffled if we are to move towards a real calm within ourselves.

‘Bad company corrupts good ways.’ (1 Corinthians 15:34)
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Aspects of love

Since the moment of my daughter’s first hearing of the accident on the M25 on 7th May, and of learning that it had involved a group of her friends, the available time and space within my thoughts – that which results in the words I lay down on these pages – has had only one possible focus: aspects of love, of loss and of grief.

Every moment in our lives is filled with potential. A single moment has the power to change anything and everything, and when it does the effects linger long after the moment, the hour and the day have passed. Our lives can be changed utterly, for good or ill.
History is made of such moments.
There is hope for the most evil of men, but they are finally lost in a single thought, word or deed; and every saint is born of similarly fleeting moments.

As William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem, Easter 1916, ‘All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.’

In the same poem he also says the following, which I include here as a final footnote to my posts of 16th May:

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.

Goodness could be summed up as an awareness of the need to love, a willingness to respond to that awareness, and a preparedness and ability to manifest that love in a response. From many angles goodness and love are one and the same.

There are among us some truly amazing people, and I believe there are probably far more of them than we are ever likely to realize.

They are the ones who always seem able to think of others before themselves; who cheerfully burden themselves with the problems and needs of others regardless of their own lack of time, or energy, or sleep, or financial security, and without giving any hint of their own needs, or even their considerable distress when their own lives are filled with seemingly insurmountable troubles.

Most of us are not able to attain, let alone maintain, this level of goodness.

We get there sometimes, and, occasionally, we may surprise ourselves by maintaining both our commitment and our smile over an extended period; but perhaps only for a certain person, or in selected situations, or at particular times. We try, and we quietly tell ourselves that we do our best; we fail, and we brush our failures aside while hanging onto an inflated satisfaction of having done something, for someone, at sometime in the past.

In no way do we see ourselves, or do others see us as bad people. We are ordinary good people: we have our faults, but we mean no harm to anybody. By no stretch of the imagination could we be seen as evil people. Our ordinariness is apparent through our lack (but not a total lack) of love.

M. Scott Peck has written on this in his book, ‘The Road Less Travelled’.
He equates a lack of love with forms of laziness, saying that ‘Ordinary laziness is non-love; evil is anti-love’, and that, ’Evil is laziness carried to its ultimate, extraordinary extreme.’

He goes on to say, ’ … Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love. Some ordinary lazy people may not lift a finger to extend themselves unless they are compelled to do so. Their being is a manifestation of nonlove; still, they are not evil. Truly evil people, on the other hand, actively rather than passively avoid extending themselves. They will take any action in their power to protect their own laziness, to preserve the integrity of their sick self. Rather than nurturing others, they will actually destroy others in this cause. … As the integrity of their sick self is threatened by the spiritual health of those around them, they will seek by all manner of means to crush and demolish the spiritual health that may exist near them.’

Once we have come to recognize the truth conveyed in his words, we become aware of just how much ‘evil people’ do indeed ‘resist the awareness of their own condition’.

My mind dwells, unhappily and reluctantly, upon these matters through opening someone else’s post this morning.

One of those rare persons whose life is one continuous commitment to goodness and the expression and manifestation of love, and whom I have known for many years, has gone to spend time helping in an orphanage in the far East. An ongoing source of great distress for her, caused by people who are so far removed from her goodness, has meant that I am having to open letters from some sources to ensure that the situation does not get completely out of hand in her absence.

I recognise Scott Peck’s ‘evil people’ in those who cause this distress; they well know the goodness they constantly attack and abuse, and it is their recognition of that goodness which brings about and maintains their apparent hatred towards her. I know of no other person in this world who could feel anything other than love for her.
I thank God that I have never known anyone else I could ever have regarded as being evil; but how I wish I could say I did not find myself capable of such thought towards any person.
I am aware that in saying this I could be accused of being judgmental, but I have simply tried to be honest about my feelings so that I may lend weight to what I shall propose in my next post, as an essential requirement of spiritual peace.

Scott Peck neatly covers my own experience in the following words: -
‘As entropy … and the evolutionary flow of love … are opposing forces, it is only natural that these forces will be relatively in balance in most people, while a few at one extreme will manifest almost pure love, and a few at the other extreme pure entropy or evil. Since they are conflicting forces, it is also inevitable that those at the extremes will be locked in combat; it is as natural for evil to hate goodness as it is for goodness to hate evil.’

The outwardly visible manifestation of this combat throws up one glaring difference between the two combatants; evil appears to hate the person as well as the goodness they possess, while goodness hates only the evil. The truly good person continues to love the person, and continues to hope for the transformation that is possible right up until their dying breath.

Both destruction and salvation remain within reach for each one of us, until that moment when potential becomes reality: - for good or ill; that moment in which we make our final choice on the battlefields of loss and gain, of joy and grief; among the glorious blooms and terrible thorns of conflict between the powers of good and evil: - among the various aspects of love.
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Pentecost

'There are many different gifts, but it is always the same Spirit;

there are many different ways of serving, but it is always the same Lord.

There are many different forms of activity,

but in everybody

it is the same God who is at work in them all.'

(1 Corinthians 12:4-6)

... but emptied.

The answer is not to be found in the feeling of being filled.

It is not in the sensation of being full, nor in reaching that bursting point which is so well relieved by our emotional breakdown.
It is to be found in the utter constancy of the emptiness which underlies all feelings of being filled, of fullness, of bursting and overflowing, and of subduing into a featureless numbness.
Grief feels as though it would fill us with something; it feels that way.
As already said, we retain an inbuilt susceptibility to being influenced by our feelings, and an awareness of this susceptibility is one facet of our increasing maturity.
We feel grief, and we feel the mounting pressure: we feel as though filled, and, through the unbreakable ties of love, we are devastated by our loss and our sorrows. We are human: we are man-and-womankind; we are in this world, and, as long as we are tied to our physical lives we are necessarily still partially ‘of this world’. Held down by this (so to speak) physical handicap, we have no option, when in the grasp of grief, but to allow our feelings to rule us.
This physicality involves the cycle of birth, reproduction, nurture and love, and death, and whenever grief does not follow the slow-turning wheels of our existence, cutting through our futures instead, with a seemingly annihilating slash across every grain, then is that devastation utterly and completely beyond our comprehension. Until …

Until our awareness of a presence, and our steps of faith, have led us through and beyond the edges that may have frightened and stressed us in the past, and brought us to an island of rock: the rock upon which an inconceivable strength can be built.
We are carried into a trust that enables us to stand erect at the very edge.
We are poised at the brink of emptiness, without fear and without apprehension, and are infused with a distant yearning: with a reciprocal longing that would fill the void before us and within us. A quiet flow one unto the other begins.

Now we are able to recognize that throughout our turmoil and distress, the pressure within has been constant.
Within and without, the pressures now seem equalized, and regardless of what may come our way, we sense that if we move within, and welcome in, the pressure will remain the same – as though not even there.
Humanity, paradox, and the power of love, joyfully entwine within the temporary helplessness that is our grief.
With faith, that same grief may bring us to the hem of a newfound joy: a joy, the vaguest hints of which have played their part in bringing me to my own place at the very edge, with my need for soliloquy, for prayer, and above all for time alone with my God.

Grief fills us with emptiness.
We are never more vulnerable than when empty, and emptiness longs to be filled.
God fills the void as soon as it is formed, and from the very first instant is inextricably enmeshed in our grief.
Our natures make it impossible for us to realize this until we are able to sense the stability of the emptiness, but He waits for us: He gives us time.
The void cannot be filled by anything other than God, and it is only our rejection of Him that enables anything else to lodge within.

Grief fills us with emptiness: an emptiness filled by God; and thus our grief fills us with God’s presence.
He awaits our recognition, our acceptance, and our trust.
Our admission, in faith, that we do not understand all things, allows Him to fill us with His peace.
Ultimately, in time, and despite our continuing disbelief in such an apparently impossible idea, - grief fills us with God’s peace.

Let us pray that God’s peace may truly become known to all who mourn.

‘Let your generosity extend to all the living,

do not withhold it even from the dead.

Do not turn your back on those who weep,

but share the grief of the grief-stricken.’

(Ecclesiasticus 7:33-34 (Vulgate 37-38) )

Amen.

Not filled ...

Grief feels as though it would fill us with something; but what?

I asked myself that question while trying to articulate more immediate thoughts and feelings centred on the deaths, and the resultant grief, of those already named and their families and friends.
I felt that I already knew the outline of the answer, but awareness of that sense of filling was lost and forgotten in the tautness of sensations created by it; and though I had asked the question, the time was known to be wrong for dwelling on the answer.
There was a need for other things to be said.

Even as I finish writing those last few words, I am slowly shaking my head in a fascinated, and almost amused, acknowledgement of an understanding that occasionally - but increasingly - drifts past me; the sense that almost everything in this life is born of, involves, demonstrates and returns to that essentially self-contradictory state that is both held and set free by that ‘smile’ of a word: - paradox.
The time was wrong; but when the ultimate answer is glimpsed, the time is not wrong: no time is wrong.
Indeed the two words, the two concepts, simply do not belong together except in the immediacy of situations where our physical, worldly, outer and sensational selves drown all faith and hope, all inner strength and conviction, into the depth and dark of near despair.

We are born into a life of sensation: we learn, we act and we survive through our senses, but acting according to our feelings in all things is where we came from, not where we are today, and not where we are going. Our animal selves remain very much alive, continuing to play their part in this troubled world, but mankind has moved on; indeed it is only through moving on that we have become mankind.
We retain an inbuilt susceptibility to being unduly influenced by our feelings, and an awareness of this susceptibility is one facet of our increasing maturity.
We are born to elevate ourselves above our physical instincts: not to annihilate them - (impossible), nor to completely suppress and deny them - (improbable, and in many cases inadvisable), but to acknowledge them and to become aware of them as being only a part of what makes us what and who we are.
Our awareness of our susceptibility must replace the prominence of the susceptibility itself.
Knowing that we can easily be led astray by our feelings, must replace our immediate following of their leading.

Grief, perhaps more than anything else, brings the strength of our feelings and the power of emotion into a full-frontal confrontation with our supposed maturity. Reality is buried deep beneath incomprehensibility and inconsolability.
The pressure welling up within brings us, as it were, to a bursting point; we do burst at times, physically, when something in us shifts in such a way that a crack opens, we sob, and the tears flow. The wave flows uncontrollably over us until, sometimes quite unexpectedly, it ebbs away to leave us safely upon firm ground once more. We feel better for it.
In this way our grief can be transformed into a quiet emptiness; we gaze across the calm ocean of life from our lonely spot upon the shore, until some small craft sails into view; some sight, some sound – a word, a laugh - some object: an ordinary everyday touch from the past, from long ago or from only yesterday. We rest our eyes and mind upon it for the briefest of moments, and we begin to reach for it, but it blurs within our tears; it is but an echo.
The sting returns; yesterdays are suddenly all we have … and the wave builds itself once more to crash upon our shore.
All such moments are filled with the emptiness of these echoes.
But they also lead toward an answer …

The physical release of this pressure can deceive us.
It is necessary and it is good; it is to be welcomed and encouraged, and on its own it is capable of bringing any of us to an eventual acceptance, and to a continuation of our lives. But within us, despite our experience of mounting pressure, and its release through the breaking of these waves, the pressure remains constant.
The sensation of pressure can be so great that we can become as sailcloth in a storm, or as a drum-skin spread and taut to its very limit. Awareness of pressure within is drowned out by the fierce burning sensation of our outer skin stretched until it must tear open.
When all is calm, we continue to gently hold onto ourselves as our shell hums with a residual heat from that pain, but we feel empty, hollowed out, numbed for a time to whatever had been filling us. We may feel deadened to almost everything, but if we dare to drag ourselves from the mock-comfort and the lethargy of this place, from the meaninglessness and pointlessness that form the framework of this mindset, and if, in so doing, we can hold back from the ‘brave face’ of brightly venturing into activity while feeling able to do so, we may recognize the beginnings of the answer to that question: -
What is it with which grief would fill us ?
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Homecoming

Since first hearing of Ben’s survival amid the loss of his friends, I have been so aware of the seemingly unapproachable and virtually untouchable nature of the place within which he now finds himself.
And through his living and homecoming, I have been drawn towards a desperate inability to know where to look, where to think, where to be; towards an urgent search for an exit: for a door that would let me out of reality, and into a place where I would not have to even think about such things.
I have been drawn towards, but safeguarded from being drawn into.

Whatever a person’s age, a daughter is a daughter: a son is a son: a child is a child is a child.
Parenthood is the most awesome responsibility, challenge, devotion, comfort, and both giver and receiver of joy, that this life can give. And because it is all these things, it is also the potential recipient of the greatest sorrows this world has to offer.
The world surrounds us with such sorrows every day, but we are for the most part free to live our lives without really noticing them. When we do notice, we can - for most of the time – continue to separate ourselves from their reality; we do not know what to do or to say, so we hide from ourselves by keeping back from where the pain is being truly felt.
I am on the outer fringes of the tragedy referred to in yesterday’s post, and am therefore able – if I so choose - to keep well out of reach of the pain involved, but I am held where I am as a consequence of my being filled to overflowing.
I know I must stand here at the edge, and not fade quietly back into the shadows.
I hope that in doing so, and in spite of my attempts to carefully walk barefoot round the perimeter of other peoples’ grief, I neither step too loudly nor venture too close.

Six men have died, and together with my stated feelings on hearing of Ben’s survival, I have had six words constantly returning to my mind: - “He that shall live this day …”
They are words penned by William Shakespeare (Henry V. Act 4, Scene 3) as being spoken before the battle of Agincourt in 1415.
That is of no relevance here, and nor is the fact that the battle was fought on St Crispian’s day, but the legacy conveyed by the words echoes within me nonetheless, almost as a prophecy of remembrances to come.

“He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words
… Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.”

Those names, ‘familiar in his mouth as household words’, are already written far more than continued life would have demanded, and in the costliest of inks.

The loneliness, and the vast aloneness of these days, which will have no chance of preparation for lifting until all funeral services are done, cannot be approached by anyone who has not been there themselves: by the likes of me.
Distress entwined in the joy of living, and relief and happiness overlaying the sorrow and disbelief of lifelong separation through death, will have conjured a kaleidoscope of confusion in the very thought of he that outlived that day.

Peace be with you Ben; dear, dear son.
Peace be with you Parents; dear Mother, dear Father.

When time has past, and not before: when ready, and when sure; when questions such as “Why me?” have settled in their rightful place, may he and his parents be able to ask their questions from the only standpoint that can bring the answers.

“When the shadows fall upon hill and glen, and the bird-music is mute: when the silken dark is a friend, and the river sings to the star, ask thyself brother, ask thyself sister, the question thou alone hast power to answer.”
‘O King and Saviour of men, what is Thy gift to me? And do I use it to Thy pleasing?’
( Hebridean Altars. Alistair Mclean. )

Amid the more immediately seen needs for support and prayer associated with the parents and families of those who have died, let us not forget the immense difficulties and challenges inherent in the living of a sole survivor and his parents.

They have their homecoming, but the simplicity of homecoming will never be the same.

Ben Pert

May he live in peace.

Sons and brothers

Again, I find myself falling impossibly short of understanding.
I am dulled once more by the deaths of sons. (4th March post.)

Grief feels as though it would fill us with something; but what?
When we are at a distance (geographically) from the person who dies, it is from the initial shock at receiving the news; when we are present with them, it is from the moment when the reality of their life having ended hits us. Even in situations where death is expected, and may have been so for a long time, those first moments bring an awareness, a realization, a making real of what had been imagined, dwelt upon, anticipated.
We are swamped by the suddenly confirmed difference between expectation and fact: between fear of the future, and survival in the present.

We had thought that knowing what to expect readied us for what was to come; we had expected to know where we were, recognize how we felt, and handle everything the situation may bring with a sorrowed, but unbroken, competence and confidence born of our past experiences, combined with a form of rehearsal for this time which had been running through our minds.
This is where we begin to learn that there are some things we regard and take on board as experiences, which are in fact nothing more than imaginations. Some may indeed be based on actual experience, but they are overlaid by our imagination; we cloak past realities with a personal veneer in such a way that it hurts us as we do it; and yet we are glad to do it. For a few moments here, for a little while there, we prick, or even stab ourselves with a genuinely hurtful imagining that it is our parent, our sibling, our child who has gone. We feel that loss as our own.

For a very short time we really do feel grief.
We involve ourselves in a form of role-play which files away the overlaid experience as something we have been through.
We feel better for having hurt ourselves. Why?
Because we know our own parents will die; we know we may outlive some of our siblings and our friends.
Because, in these and in similar forms, these experiences prepare us for the reality of death among those closest to us; … don’t they ?
They are enabling us to deal with the actual situation more easily when it comes; … aren’t they ?
They are building a strength within us that will bring a quiet acceptance of reality when it confronts us; … aren’t they ?
Through this whole process we shall become able to support and console others less able to bear their grief; … shan’t we ?
Asking ourselves these questions is a further extension of this same process. We place each imagining, each overlay, each self-inflicted pain in place as we attempt to build our tower of strength.
Every loss of life not directly involving us, or our immediate family and friends, is felt - at least in part – as a personal pain; … isn’t it?

O, dear, dear Lord, how can we so deceive ourselves? How can we be so very wrong?
Our tower of strength is a mere crumble waiting for the flow of our tears to wash it into oblivion: awaiting truth’s verdict among the grains of sand upon which it is built.
We shall never truly feel grief until it is ours.

“The heart knows its own grief best, nor can a stranger share its joy.” (Proverbs 14:10)

My accumulating years have gradually brought this home to me, and, though I know the pains following the death of parents, I also know them to have been following what we see as the normal and logical pattern: the generations passing through life and departing in their turn. The young replace the mature, and the mature replace the aged as their lives come to an end.
I have not felt the depths involved in the loss of siblings and close friends of my own generation.
Over these last few days I have struggled in a limbo of helplessness as my own child has been shattered by a grief I have never had to feel. Friends have been lost, suddenly, incomprehensibly, and utterly.
She, and many others, have been brutally thrust into a new level of maturity they can never shed.
The world has changed for them.
They have been forced, in an instant, to the very edge of something barely conceivable: to the very lip of understanding as they know it; and this in the hearts and minds of talented individuals whose understanding is already considerable.

Yesterday saw, at St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham, the assembly of their accumulated grief at the first of a series of funerals.
My daughter’s return from it – in and of itself a joy cloaked in a dreadful poignancy – brought my own imaginings and overlays down around my head. I could not stop feeling some of her pain, and had to wander off more than once as I dissolved into tears.
My fragility and grief (in the circumstances I feel almost ashamed to use the word in connection with myself) meant that I was unable to give her any real support other than simply being there. I was distressed at seeing the edge towards which she and others had been taken, while I was being kept well back from it.
But, but, but … Is it not simply being there that is most valuable of all?
And thus the poignancy deepens still further: - she returned home. She was here.
Her mother and I were here, and through her homecoming we were able to be here for her.
In our varying degrees, we are held in the grip of a profound inadequacy which, without our awareness of God’s presence, would sweep us towards oblivion.

And here all words from a stranger verge on sacrilege as the fringes of reality are sensed; the reality of the loss for those whose loss it most completely is: those parents and siblings for whom, in this life, there would be no further homecoming.


May Mary, the Mother, who understands the losing of a son more than any other, point the way and lead them towards peace.

May the Father rest His hand upon them.
May Jesus, the Son, sit beside them.
May the Holy Spirit dwell within them.

And may their sons and brothers, having gone on ahead, rest safe in God’s hand until the homecoming of those they have left behind.

Chris Janaway 28, Matt O' Donnell 30, Jon Chandler 26, Andrew Graney 29,

Rohan Chadwick 27,

and
Michael Hutchinson 44.

Conviction

Yesterday, my sifting of words brought an unexpected and somewhat confusing shift in my understanding.
Not for the first time, I found I had been unduly influenced by the feeling of having been blessed rather than allowing the blessing itself to influence me, and had thus failed to recognize the simplicity, as well as the extent of the availability of the blessing.
But within a few hours I became aware that there had been a further shift back towards my start-point.
The end result is that I now have a deeper appreciation of what I have received.

At first it seemed I had gone off at a tangent, distracted and drawn away from confidence in my understanding of myself by my own choice of words in my previous post. I wrote that we need to recognize a confirmation of God’s touch in the peace and the untroubled nature of that which fills us. The very mention of our being filled set things in motion.
I had, in fact, been unduly influenced by the supposed recognition of my having allowed my feelings to unduly influence me.
(Well may you believe it little wonder that the writer needs to do a lot of sorting out before he even knows what he thinks !)

My perception had been advanced, but my mind needed time to adjust to this slightly clearer view of reality: to assimilate the full meaning of this revelation. I had jumped to a conclusion before giving myself time to unravel all the information.
That I need to do this unravelling confirms the feeble vulnerability of my human nature, and the slowness of my thinking.
That I seek constantly to turn revelation into a framework of information in the first place – information I alone have produced - confirms my shamefully poor willingness and ability to allow revelation to speak and grow within me, without any self-generated tampering, adjustment, embellishment or dilution.

I had laid out my overlapping thoughts before me, as though a collage upon the ground where I could see them more clearly, and walk slowly among them. Some disintegrated as my steps disturbed them, rising, fragmenting, and settling again as dust. Others remained intact, and - as it were - wafted upwards to be read and re-thought. These were blended into the beginnings of what became the previous post, but during this process my perception was given a nudge.
It seemed that I was being knocked off course, but within moments I realized (wrongly) that I had been straying from the path I was intended to tread; I thought I had been looking from the wrong angle and was being put back on track.

I had been pondering the fact that I am brim full for a reason: that it is a blessing I have been given for a reason, and that I am in a place to which I have been brought for a reason.
I am not able to hide from it, and I am not able to retreat from it. I am still unaware of where it is leading me, and perhaps it is for this reason that I was pondering it, and am still thinking about it and writing about it here.
Feeling so filled is not a state from which there could be any wish to hide, or any desire to retreat; it engenders only a longing to be led to where I am meant to be, and an inability to simply sit back with closed eyes in a dream of contentment.
It is a sensation of having been brought closer to all that is good, to something once held but long since lost, as though within sight of Eden, and, though there is a very real pull towards it, the greater compulsion is not to walk within, but to take the wonder and the peace that emanates from it into the near desolation stretching to the horizon around it; to walk, with Jesus, through the world of labour and pain into which Adam and Eve were banished, and in which we all spend our lives.

It strikes me how closely my description of the sensation fits a powerful visual image that haunted me for some time a few years ago.
It was during the period when the Benedictine community at Stanbrook Abbey were discerning God’s will for their future; having to work towards a difficult decision. Should they stay? Should they move?
My image was of a single figure, a Benedictine sister, standing alone on the bare ground of an empty and featureless plain stretching to the haziness of hills on the far horizon. The image was full of a glaring, energy-sapping, desiccating light: the sun as destroyer, not as the growth-giving warmth and light that it becomes when in company with the water of life.
Everything made very clear that this was desert, but the ground upon which she stood, though devoid of plant growth, was good fertile land. The ground was, as it were, longing for something to bring it to life. It would have cried out if it could.
In the midst of that lifeless plain: on that vast potential of receptive and fertile ground, the sister stood, still and confident in her complete knowledge that God had placed her there, and that God would tell her what to do and when to do it. (And probably a great deal more than I could read into it.)
Her black habit spoke powerfully of solidity, permanence and certainty. Her very presence spoke of having been built upon rock, and the potential in her presence matched the potential of the ground upon which she stood.
That potential was conveyed in her single outstretched and slightly cupped hand.
Within the hand one small scoop of grain.

The Stanbrook community will be moving to Yorkshire.
The whole process leading to the final decision, will have ensured that this is where they are meant to be. All doubts and uncertainties are outweighed by the fact that the community already has within it all that it needs to do what God wills in their present situation.
Knowing that the same principle applies to all of us, I must believe that it applies to me.
I must in no way shrink from anything asked of me by belittling my interpretation of the gifts I have received.
My feeling so filled and overflowing, is for a reason.
I briefly believed I had made it more significant than it was; that my awareness was no more than the blessing that is ours very early in our journey towards Him.
The powers that would restrain us never rest; they can create in us a fear of our own pride where none exists, as well as hiding and disguising it when it is real.
I am now more sure than before I started, that I am brim full for a reason; I overflow for a reason; I am where I am for a reason.

‘No one lights a lamp to put it under a tub; they put it on the lamp-stand where it shines for everyone in the house.
In the same way your light must shine in people’s sight, …’ (Matthew 5:15-16)

I am brought to the very edge once more.
A breath-holding, searching and longing edge of anticipation.
My greater conviction will help to ensure that I hold myself here for as long as it takes.
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Touch and go

I began these pages with the suggestion that a common destination is the only realization we can truly share.
Reaffirmation of that fact serves to remind me that there are no conclusions in this life; our paths converge, we meet, we bring both our gifts and our giftedness to the common table as we become fellow travellers, and we move on. However closely we may walk, we shall never merge: we travel our own journeys in parallel with each other.

As we journey further from the world, and closer to the source of the answers to all needs, we should simultaneously venture deeper into the world, and into a clearer comprehension of the needs of the people we meet. In doing so, we come to the awesome awareness that we are called upon to play a part in the bringing together of these sometimes (apparently) irreconcilable halves, both in ourselves and in the world at large.
It is as though we could reach out with both hands and grasp the previously unreachable bare ends of a severed cable; grasp, and - becoming a living symbol of prayerful obedience to God’s will - place our hands together in petition for the restoration of that which has been lost. Thus we bring His light into the darkness, and enable His power to flow in places where there had been no reception.
In short, we become conscious of having been empowered; we are able to bring God’s power into other lives and situations.

And where are these needy people and troubled circumstances?
They are right where we are. They are all around us. We are in the midst of them.
However deep our felt need for help in areas of our own lives, we have become a part of God’s provision within a world that ails, aches and sorrows far beyond the pain of most of our own experiences and mistakes.
Those among us whose present troubles or fearful pasts are way beyond most of our imaginings, are potentially able to bring God’s love into hidden recesses which may remain inaccessible to everyone else. Having themselves been through the darkest of nights, they are empowered to become light in the emptiness of the most deeply buried voids. They are frequently the best placed to bring a new dawn into lives which are being lived as endless night.

Before we can serve God and each other in this way, we need to be following in our Lord’s footsteps in our own lives. We need to have become fully aware of His presence, and of having become part of His flow of love into the world. We need to be aware that we have been touched by God, and to recognize a confirmation of that touch in the peace and the untroubled nature of that which fills us.
We know we have been found; we know we have been called by name.
Those of us who have experienced His touch in our lives, must extend our belief to an acknowledgement that we are now counted among the ‘Touched’; that we are called to believe in our ability to bring others within reach of that same redeeming touch.
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Wherever we find ourselves to be, - ‘let us go forward from the point we have each attained.’ (Philippians 3:16)
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Sifting of words

All that I write here, and all thinking that precedes and accompanies this writing, is part of my constant struggle to work out and to understand what it is that I actually do think. I have an ongoing need to straighten my various strands of thought into a form of words before I can say to myself - let alone to anyone else - that I know my own mind.

My need to sift my own thoughts and words has meant that talking silently within myself has become natural to me: soliloquy is now a part of me.
I have said that the words of George Eliot (23.4.07 post) partially describe my feelings while working in this way.
It is only since my faith came alive within me, and since my focus shifted markedly towards a desire to immerse myself in spiritual matters, and to cloak my other interests in the light found in that immersion, that I have felt this need.
I believe the tendency had always been there, but not sufficient awareness of the subject matter that would call forth its practice.
It was an inbuilt but buried part of me: one facet of the inbuilt, buried but now quickening version of me that, through my increasing faith, was being brought to light and to life.
It was, and is, part of the real me: the person I was made to be: the person I am meant to be.

The lifelong habits of my worldly self are not discarded easily, and it is this part of me that continues to produce ‘chaff and grain together’.
The ‘faithful hand’ that now sifts my thoughts and words, and gives me ‘the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person’, is my inner self: the enkindled reality of my existence; the person who is learning to discern the will of God, and who shadows, encourages, and limits the amount of chaff produced by his wayward twin. That the two of us get on so well together is a blessing, but I must trust that I can be transformed completely into my true self. I shall then be in an unbroken communication with God, and not, as at present, in a tentative contact with Him only through a form of discussion with my inner voice.
I am as the young Elisha, having not long left behind my earthly labours, and having (as it were) seen a glimpse of where I am required to go.
As Elijah was to him, so my inner self now seems to me.

Summarizing the feeling in that way suggests to me that I may already have been given more than I realize.
There are echoes here of my early awareness of my journey: that long-remembered sense of having been given far more than I ever knew I wanted. (see 07.02.07 post).
I have to quickly dismiss my first reaction: that disappointed-in-myself feeling that mutters “I should have known!”
Instead, I must relax and rejoice in the increased light of yet another dawning: the continuing wonder of moving through the layers of mist that separate me from the very edge of ultimate truth.
That I sometimes feel myself to be depressingly slow to recognize, to understand, to respond, to react and to act, must be accepted as a possible facet of my undeclared, and even unconscious desires to be something other than that which God wants me to be.
At the very least it is a manifestation of my impatience, and of my reluctance to accept and believe that I am good enough for God’s purpose exactly as I am.
In all things may His will be done, not mine; and in His time not mine.

Deep within each one of us is a longing to become our true selves, and this is blended with the will of God; the two are inseparable.
None of us is beyond His love, with all that it contains.
None of us is beyond the potential for doing His will.
However far we have strayed from Him, however long we have been away, however late we may feel we have left it, we have only to stop, to turn and to face Him.
We only have to follow.

Quoting George Eliot again, - “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

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