Shared truth

If we make the decision to share what is important to us with others, we open the way for the sowing of seeds in their lives, and the germinating of those already sown in our own.
We may also be enabled to form otherwise undiscovered and meaningful friendships, which, through the combining of different angles on the same shared truth, bring greater depth and clarity to the understanding of that truth.
As already quoted (15.06.07), Cardinal Newman has rightly told us that we distance ourselves from each other because ‘ we dare not trust each other with the secret of our hearts. We have each the same secret, and we keep it to ourselves, and we fear that …which really would be a bond of union. …our religion …is hollow. The presence of Christ is not in it.’

If He is present when we meet in His name, and yet His presence can be made known among us without a requirement that such a meeting involve a conscious declaration of that intent, then it is through our already having within us that which brings the awareness of His presence: - Himself. Having already accepted His invitation to dwell with Him, our awareness of Jesus in our own lives realizes a constant faith in His presence. Spending time with others who similarly carry Him within, enables the otherwise internal flow of thought to be brought to the surface and out into the open; the ideas and questions, the hopes and longings, the doubts entwined with our undeniable belief in something we struggle to grasp, are all made more fully known to ourselves as we utter our faltering words to others, and as we share in their experience of doing likewise. The result is a strengthening of trust, of love and of faith: the fanning of the flame within and the mutual grasping of a nucleus of shared truth; and the presence of Christ is in it.

The joint expression of feeling and belief amounts to so much more than any individual could achieve on his or her own. This truth applies to everything, and in every case where the belief, the interest and the enthusiasm are for truth, reality and integration, rather than falsehood, fantasy and fragmentation, it brings us within reach of what may previously have been an entirely absent spiritual awareness.
An example of this is a book about trees where a writer and a photographer, both with a passion for their subject, combined their talents and their shared fascination. (The Tree. John Fowles & Frank Horvat) These few words from each of them give me something beyond the pleasure derived from the rest of the book; they demonstrate how the object of our deep interest – in this case trees in particular, and thus the natural world in general – can place the greater truths of our existence before us. Whether or not this leads to, or advances a real spiritual awakening will depend on whether we have ‘ a heart to understand, eyes to see, or ears to hear.’
The writer confides that entering woods is for him, 'almost like leaving land to go into water, another medium, another dimension. When I was younger, this sensation was acute. Slinking into trees was always slinking into heaven.'
The photographer writes in the preface, 'Trying to be truthful about something close to me is like trying to unravel a tangled piece of string. I pull a loop this way, then that way, and each time I attempt to undo an obvious knot, I create new ones.'

The one expresses the feeling of great personal significance going beyond the physical surroundings and natural situation. The other conveys the impossibility of describing such feeling and such experience.
I glean what I can from such attempts as these, and in my turn, can only try to give outlines of what stirs me in comparable ways.

One of the long-lived changes in my own life since Jesus became an undeniable friend, is in the way I perceive so much in the world that others may dismiss as imagination or fantasy, non-events, or simply nothing. (Such reactions are one of the reasons we hold back from speaking to others about the very things we yearn to share with someone. Even among those we believe to share our faith and awareness, ‘we dare not trust each other with the secret of our hearts.’)
My experience with the nettle leaves is an example of that new perception, as is my belief that there is something meaningful for me in seemingly random words, actions and moments which may grasp me as I pass. Of the words, the immeasurable content of the Bible is the obvious example, but the above quotes from ‘The Tree’, in linking the natural world with the spiritual, are also such as these.

As with the Israelites in the desert, God had me wait for forty years before breathing on the embers within me; before allowing the opening of my heart, my eyes and my ears to truly begin. It has taken a further twenty years for me to become a vessel of the size and strength required to hold that with which He wished to fill me. But as soon as ready, He poured, and I became Brim Full.
He continues to pour, and, being already filled to capacity, I am unable to do anything other than overflow: to become a part of His endless stream of blessings and love into the world. With that has come an awareness of responsibility and a renewed sense of staying awake: of watching; and it has generated an increased desire to be involved in nothing where ‘the presence of Christ is not in it.’
This is simply another vantage point on our journey, but is one to which He would bring us all. However diverse our separate ways, He would have us meet here to lay bare our shared secret and the truths we carry locked within ourselves. He calls us to meet in His name, to stand together at the very edge, and to be aware of His presence among us.

Let us lay ourselves open to the power of the Spirit of Pentecost, that each of us may be brought more fully to life and to an understanding of God’s call upon us.

Holy Spirit,
You have grasped me and drawn me to you.
There are things You would have me do.
I know not what they are,
But I do know I have yet to begin.
Fill me, and immerse me in your fire.
Awaken me fully that I may be ready;
Prepare me to follow wherever You may lead.

Strangers

Occasionally we meet people with whom, within minutes, we feel comfortable, at ease and at peace in a way that seems to have no bearing on similar interests, ages, temperament, education, or any other possible sharing among life’s variables. There is at once a form of attraction that brings a wish to spend time with them and to hear more of what they may have to say, as well as to dwell within the sense of a common awareness and a shared calling towards unity and the reality of community. There is also the encouragement and affirmation derived from the discovery that such persons may be equally interested in us and in what we may have to say. All this is born of that presence which has been more clearly realized in us and among us by our coming together.

We may meet with such people in many ways, and this may well be by prior arrangement with people we have met before: perhaps with people who have become close friends. We spend time together in the knowledge that we have a shared faith, and, whether consciously or not, we know what Jesus said: - ‘…where two or three meet in my name, I am there among them.’

I wish I could say that I was frequently aware of this, or that I consciously share in His presence on a regular basis, but the reality is that it is a far too infrequent occurrence for me.
I am aware of His presence in my own life, but, apart from being a member of a church congregation during Sunday services, I rarely meet with anyone else to share in that presence and to build upon its influence in my life. If I did, and the other person or persons were fully aware, then He would undoubtedly be there with us, but my shallow understanding and my frequent distraction and loss of focus would probably leave me stranded as though upon an empty shore; believing there to be something somewhere, but, despite my belief in His presence when I am alone and my awareness of His words, deaf and blind to His presence with us in the here and now.

I suspect there are many aspects to this, several of which come to mind almost at once. I believe three reasons in particular combine to create within me a barrier to any meaningful entering into community; this in spite of my constant longing for the breath of His presence among a group of trusted spiritual friends.
Firstly, an awareness of my own failings and faults.
Secondly, a choosiness about who - in my eyes - may be eligible to be the other one or two, (or more), and a far too eager readiness to focus on the differences between us. (One of those failings and faults.)
And thirdly, never being in a position to meet with those whose presence and whose judgement I value most highly, and with whom I feel, rightly or wrongly, that I would most benefit. (Through fear that they may judge me as unworthy, just as I judge others with whom I could possibly meet.)
The end result is that one reason feeds the other in a continual swirl of what amounts to discontent. My own dissatisfaction with myself holds me back from making contact with people, and this, having become almost habitual, ensures the continued unlikelihood that I shall do so in the near future.

This is something of which I am always aware, but as the years have passed the constant tension and frustration resulting from the unfulfilled need to share my faith in a meaningful way have slipped away. I still wish for some things that I feel are lacking, and that I believe to be of importance, but the discontent has ebbed to the point where it no longer actively troubles me, and my far greater wish is that at all times I may discern God’s will for me, and act according to that will.
For many years I have held that if He wished me to meet or become involved with particular people, He would undoubtedly make this known to me, or to them, or to all of us.
I continue to act on that belief rather than trying to counter my withdrawal as outlined above. (Other people’s desire to maintain the status quo can also have a profound bearing on such matters, but that draws me away from these thoughts and will therefore be returned to at another time.)

I began with the words, ‘Occasionally we meet people with whom, within minutes, we feel comfortable, at ease and at peace …’
All this has been brought to the forefront of my mind through such an encounter which left me smiling in the afterglow of God’s presence.
On 1st June, three strangers, of whom I was one, met by chance at Hallow Church, just north of Worcester, where they – as many churches - have a regular weekly ‘coffee morning’: a drop-in for parishioners, locals and passers by.
There were in fact four of us, but the fourth, a lady named Angela, does not speak, and she spent the time drinking her cups of tea, watching us and listening to us. She was known to me, and was the reason for my being there for the first time, having needed someone to provide transport for her. She was also already known to the lady providing the coffee as she is a regular visitor.
On arrival there were only two other people there, the lady providing the service, and another lady from Carlisle who was a writer researching for a book; the church at Hallow was relevant to her research and I gather the local knowledge of the parishioner with whom she was speaking was very helpful to her. From their ease with each other, and their obvious interest in what they were discussing, I assumed them to be old friends. Learning that the writer had only moved north to Carlisle in recent years seemed to confirm this, though just after she left, and as Angela and I were preparing to leave, I learned that I was not the only stranger: the two ladies had never met before.
A quiet talk, for what seemed a few minutes but in reality was the best part of an hour; the three of us, each new to the others, enjoying a conversation that ranged through the English countryside and churches, and hymns, and orphanages in Peru and Thailand, and a life changing meeting of strangers in Ireland, and which - at every point – was filled with a shared awareness of God’s presence and influence in the world and in the lives of individuals.
There were things said that meshed with aspects of my past, and blended with half-forgotten dreams, and being drawn into the combined presence found me saying things I do not normally speak of very freely. The interest shown, and the voiced opinion that some of what I said was inspiring and should be written down and made available to a wider audience, left me wondering if perhaps the three of us (or even the four of us; it was Angela’s need that brought me there) had been meant to meet in that way. Whatever the truth, we met and we gained from the meeting. We each left to go our separate ways, but carrying the seeds sown by the others in our hearts and minds.
As one of the ladies said before leaving,’ There is a God! – and He is at work among us.’

We had not knowingly come together in Jesus’ name, but each of us had brought Him with us.
With His presence in each of us as individuals it was inevitable that He should also become present among us as a group.

- ‘For where two or three meet in my name, I am there among them.’ (Matthew 18:20)
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Estrangement

We each construct a framework for the world in which we live.
That world takes its form from the actual places within which it is built, and from the culture and qualities of the people within those places, and yet, the results of this ‘self-build’ instinct and mentality are immensely more varied than can be accounted for by the physical conditions around us, or by any anticipated variety of personality and experience among our neighbours.
We place bricks where we want or need walls, and we leave spaces for windows where we want to look beyond ourselves; we each adjust our views or lack of them to suit our own mental twists and turns, taking little or no account of anyone else. By building a wall in one area we not only shut something out from our sight and mind, but we prevent anyone outside gaining a glimpse of that aspect of ourselves which led to those bricks being placed there. We construct not only the framework for our own world, but also our own personal version of a siege mentality: a survival manual for the life to be lived within it.

All this helps to perpetuate our separation on any deeply meaningful level, but, on top of all this, we have an almost incredible ability to deceive ourselves; we can hold on to our views of the world, our visions of reality and our consistently comfortable false images even when we actually know them to be wrong.
As well as the ever-present possibility of placing something other than reality, other than the truth, in the personal but highly influential glare of our perception - as demonstrated by my own failure to appreciate my substitution of memory for clarity of vision – we so easily hold tight to habits that anchor us in our past. We may have moved well beyond the levels of awareness which gave birth to these islands of apparent solidity and safety, but we do not abandon them, discard or destroy them because they are the very things that keep us in touch with a past we regard as essential to the understanding of our present, and to a willingness to embrace the future. We may feel ourselves to be immensely brave, and to be rightly proud of our faith when we look towards that future with a stance that anticipates a certain amount of buffeting, and a half smile that (we hope) tells the world around us that we know where we are going, and that we are confident that the trials will be worthwhile.

In the present, that future is completely unimaginable.
That which we look towards is a continuation of the present, or, at most, an extension of today’s perception of reality that will extend and expand our understanding of our place in our restricted universe no more than maintaining contact with our past will allow.
As with every aspect of our existence, there are different levels at which this maintenance of links between past, present and future both sustains us and holds us back from the realization of our potential.
I have spoken of the blessing I received through the use of reading glasses. Being enabled to see clearly that which is vague and blurred and virtually invisible to us simply by placing lenses before our eyes is something we take for granted. The absolute faith we have in the science involved in the production of these lenses is as automatic as our acceptance of daylight on opening the curtains in the morning.

Our future can be restricted by a failure to give our present the freedom for which it longs, and this lack of freedom stems from a form of idolatry; the unrealistic and unwarranted framing of aspects of our past in fixed and valued images of certainty and unimpeachable truth. Relating once again to our tendency to not see that which is before us, to have eyes but not to see, I hung on to my past for many years in the form of a pair of binoculars. I had bought them for myself long before learning that clarity of vision and brightness of image far outweighed the importance of magnification.
Seeing is dependent upon having the necessary conditions and attributes for seeing, not on getting closer to, or viewing an enlarged image of that which we wish to see. Even with the prerequisite of having the will and the wish to see, there is little chance of seeing the truth in any situation that provides only the opposite priority of opportunity. My binoculars – like my natural eyesight - deteriorated with time; somewhere along the way they must have had a hard knock and double vision was the result. But still I kept them and used them, (though not often), fully aware that what I was doing was close to ridiculous.
I now have a pair with half the magnification, but with which I am once again, at times, utterly amazed by the detail and beauty of the images I see.
As with my dazzling and heightened awareness of nettle leaves, I have been drawn still deeper into the beauty of the feathered wing, the whispered growth of leaves, the caress of clouds and stars and dusk and dawn, and hidden depths beneath the magical ricochet of reflections.

Our blindness is in the world at large; it is in our interpretation of the little we see; it is in our failure to recognize the word of God; it is in our chiffon-like lack of conviction, and in our vaguest hints of faith.
Our lack of sight, our lack of hearing, our lack of awareness and understanding; our lack of trust, of hope, of love and of faith, are all hidden beneath a sense of security and solidarity built upon our routines and our past; the truth of the reality before us, around us and within us is shut out by the framework we have constructed for ourselves.
Those among us who are churchgoers will almost certainly have strengthened their fortifications still further through a partial blindness and a spiritual poverty having lead them to an unquestioned acceptance of denominational facts.
There is only one truth. That truth is available to us all.

Even among our friends we are fundamentally separate, and that which keeps us apart is a fear of the truth within ourselves: a truth we all share but which we lock away through our lack of understanding of our place in the world, and of our relationship with each other.

John Henry Newman wrote this lovely passage in a sermon on Christian Sympathy. (Parochial and Plain Sermons)
These were the first of his words I ever read, and since being given to me by a friend at Stanbrook Abbey, I have found their truth to have remained undeniable.


'Perhaps the reason why the standard of holiness among us is so low, why our attainments are so poor, our view of the truth so dim, our belief so unreal, our general notions so artificial and external is this, that we dare not trust each other with the secret of our hearts. We have each the same secret, and we keep it to ourselves, and we fear that, as a cause of estrangement, which really would be a bond of union. We do not probe the wounds of our nature thoroughly; we do not lay the foundation of our religious profession in the ground of our inner man; we make clean the outside of things; we are amiable and friendly to each other in words and deeds, but our love is not enlarged, our bowels of affection are straitened, and we fear to let the intercourse begin at the root; and, in consequence, our religion, viewed as a social system is hollow. The presence of Christ is not in it.’

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... is believing

Such thoughts as these always highlight an experience that had a profound effect on me.

As the eldest of six children, but the last to need spectacles, I had thought such things were only for others, not for me; and because I reached my fifties before needing reading glasses I probably delayed my visit to the optician longer than I should have done through believing that I would always be able to see well without them.
I had always been blessed with good eyesight, and had appreciatively used its full range to seek and examine the wonders of distant views and wildlife sightings, and to study minutely the astonishing variety and beauty of insects and plants that filled my world. Perhaps, as with many of us, what brought about the change was the realization that my arms were no longer long enough to bring the printed page into focus by holding it further away.
Having acknowledged - as a result of finding I could read in a far more relaxed fashion - that perhaps I had needed glasses after all, I used them for reading but for nothing else; that is, until the first time my eyes strayed from the page and I saw the back of my own hand. The clarity of the detail astounded me: -the texture of the skin with its pores, its creases and hairs. That alone would have been enough to set my thoughts in motion, but what made the experience so unforgettable was what I saw next.

I had parked my car on a grass verge in a quiet country lane and there I sat reading and thinking.
Having seen my hand anew, I gazed out over the woods and fields through the open window, pondering the fact that I had thought I had been seeing these things without my new-found assistance, until I lowered my eyes and looked once more through the lenses. Right there beside me, just outside the window and level with my shoulder, were – in that moment – the most beautiful creations I had ever seen. Stinging nettles!
Backlit by the sun, the hairs on the leaves and stems shone with a splendour that seemed to shout a silent, ‘I am beauty. I am beyond understanding. I am in all things.’
I was at once both spellbound and on the verge of tears; held spellbound by the delicacy and the intricacy of reality: by the other-worldly glow and pulse within even the (apparently) most ordinary of natural things; on the verge of breaking, through the fullness of feeling that accompanied my realization of just how long it had been since I last really saw what had been an everyday sight for me – the hairs on stinging nettles.

That realization brought a form of nostalgia as my mind wandered through the corridors of my past, lined with images of the most miraculous of details, the most wondrous of creations I had seen during those years. I had known such things so well that, as my eyesight deteriorated, I had substituted my memory of detail where I could no longer see the actual sight, the reality, the truth.
Until that moment I had been completely unaware of this.
To learn of it in that glorious sight brought, at first, an immense sense of loss, but then a renewed sense of wonder in the complex fragility and the fragile complexity of creation, and also a reawakened awe in relation to one specific part of that creation which had played a major part in my own life as a sighted person.
Since birth I have been able to see; so simple; so obvious. But being able to see does not bring with it an automatic ability to see: the one is the provision, the other is the utilization of what has been provided.
If I had never used the ability to see the world around me while my sight was as good as I had thought it still was, I would never have seen things that were there for all to see, and would never have missed them when they were gone. I would also never have come to see them again when difficulties with reading brought me to the optician for my first corrective lenses.

And there is another wonder we take for granted: optical lenses. We can so easily be enabled to see clearly that which is vague and blurred and virtually invisible to us; we can see the truth of what we thought to be impossible by the simplest of faiths: the placing before our eyes of those transparent but re-focussing pieces of glass.
So simple, so effective, so empowering; such an achievement for man-and-woman-kind.

So simple, so easy, so available, such a simple gift to us from the Creator of every awesome detail.
And such is all creation if we can but open our eyes and ears, our minds and our hearts.
All things are freely given to those who would receive.
And such is faith.

In that moment, God had placed me suddenly right at the very edge.
He held me there, in a place of indescribable beauty that enveloped and far exceeded all the heart-filling wonders and longed for places whose images were held locked within me.
It was one of the moments that deepened my desire to return to the edge as often as possible, and to remain there for as long as the world would allow.
In His touch upon those nettles He opened my eyes further than ever before.
Even this fully sighted person now has his own experience of Jesus giving sight to the blind.

It was as though God spoke to me as He had to Ezekiel: -
‘… you are living among a tribe of rebels who have eyes and never see, they have ears and never hear, ….’ (Ezekiel 12:2)

Or in the way He told Jeremiah to speak to the Israelites: -
‘Now listen to this, stupid, brainless people who have eyes and do not see, who have ears and do not hear !’ (Jeremiah 5:21)

Or as Moses spoke to them after leading them for forty years in the desert: -
’…until today God has not given you a heart to understand, eyes to see, or ears to hear.’ (Deuteronomy 29:3)

Lord, we confess our failure to realize the gifts you have embedded in us since birth,
And our suppressed ability to receive those you offer us each day.
Awaken to fullness all senses that bring us closer to Your will,
and to ever brightening visions of your creation.

Seeing ...

It is natural for us to take for granted those things which form an undeniable part of our existence.

As infants, we grew into an awareness of the world around us, and of the other people living in it, by a process which ran its course without any conscious contribution from ourselves; and yet, the mightiest of all wrenches must have been the one we endured during our discovery of, our wrestling with, and our realization of ourselves as separate individuals.
We had thought – with an embryonic thinking – that we were part of one whole existence: that what we felt was felt everywhere: that our discomfort and our contentment were felt by all other beings, especially those closest to us, and undoubtedly by our mothers.
Eventually we came to comprehend that we were self-contained and separate beings; we had to claim our hunger, our fear, our feeling too hot or too cold, and our self-centred expectations as our own.
This may have been quite a battle, but today we are completely unaware of what we went through, and equally unaware of our subsequent loss of the sense of oneness with creation and meaningful connections with other people.

We grew through the rest of our childhood and into adulthood with even the most outgoing and sociable persons retaining the underlying separateness born during that period. Our ability to connect with others has been undermined, and the overriding individual package we inhabit builds upon itself as we move through our lives.
Even among our families there are degrees and scales of feeling, the highest of which may not be sufficient to bring someone else’s problem to a living and a truly and accurately felt focus in our minds and hearts.
So many of us have grown into those people sitting before their TV screens, unable to empathize, and barely sympathizing with any person unknown to them except for brief periods when prompted by what they see and hear on the screen.
This is not, of course, an accurate assessment of our world nor of our place within it. It is the thin end of our humanity, where awareness has either never been awakened, or has been dulled by individualism and a perceived need for self-reliance born of fear: a reluctance, an unwillingness, even an abhorrence of showing or expressing vulnerability in a culture and a society where the creation and maintenance of external image far outweighs the recognition of internal reality.
We hide our true feelings and our weaknesses (as we believe the world would see them), behind a façade of confidence and apparent strengths which enable us to stride through the world at large. And if this is how we function, that is just what we do: we stride straight through it, unseeing, unhearing, unfeeling, and, at any meaningful level, almost completely unaware.
We have eyes but do not see.

For those of us who are not so benighted – and I believe that to be all of us (Why else would you be reading this?) – I believe there is a constant need to take stock of our position; to weigh our feelings and our self-image against an objective assessment of our actual place in our world: in our homes, in our neighbourhood, at work, and in relation to those wider issues of which we too are made aware through the same means as everyone else.
My own experience suggests that the passing years bring an ever deepening recognition of the value of life, and of our obligation to respond to the needs of others. The advance of mankind through the slow tread of the generations is so much easier to understand when our own parents and their siblings have gone from this life, when our generation has children of its own, when they in turn have grown into adulthood, and a whole new world seems to dawn in front of them.
At times it can seem that the sun will rise tomorrow only because the world is alive with the young of today. The life of every young child, every infant, every human miracle in its mother’s womb, sings joyfully of all our tomorrows, but it is into the hands of the young adults and the youth of the world that we must place today: the day we have made for them and upon which they must build.
They too should be enabled to keep the song alive; it is for them that we should light the fire every day.

Wisdom has arteries leading into every conceivable corner of our existence, but we generally gain from its life-giving flow by the smallest of steps and by the briefest of glimpses. The combination of these two aspects of wisdom - the re-assessment of our take on reality and the increasing awareness of our minimal response to the needs of the world – places the emphasis firmly on the actual facts before us: the reality rather than the supposition, the assumption, or the trusted memory.

Reading scripture can be like that. The Bible is many things, in many parts; it is in many layers, and at many depths.
In my own life, one of the most gradually emerging aspects of it has been the overall sense of oneness that pervades my appreciation when focussing loosely and hazily upon it; the sense of solidity and weight, of a power asleep in the closed silence of what is outwardly just another book. It contains and conveys a wholeness which is another aspect of the sense of oneness we once had with creation. The completion of Humanity, and the fulfilment of our individual potential is to be found in the tension between the perception of detail and an awareness of the single cloak which covers all things. Somewhere under the superficial confusions lies the constant and calm flow of highly oxygenated Wisdom; that which enables us to see and hear more perfectly, and to think more clearly based on a more accurate comprehension of what we have seen and heard. It also makes it increasingly possible for us to relax into the smile of the ultimate paradox: that nebulous singularity, that unimaginable Oneness which we know as God.

My sense of the Bible’s immensity and simplicity is tied in with my limited ability to see and to hear: my lack of wisdom.
It tells us repeatedly that having eyes does not of itself enable us to see; that having ears does not mean we can hear. And this is clearly born out in physical terms by the fact that we do not travel far through our lives before we meet someone who is either blind or deaf, but who so clearly sees and hears truth, and who understands the reality of the world around them far better than many of those who are sighted and able to hear.

Who among us is truly blind ? Who is truly deaf ?
Do I see and hear anything as God intended that I should ?
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