... and shoots

In becoming the man born of the youth born of the child I used to be, I have trodden a path that has encircled and defined my own uniqueness within a life and world filled with unforeseeable and unrepeatable opportunity. Along the road ahead lie all potential losses and gains in my struggle toward a deeper truth, and I must take all that I have learned about myself, all that lies within the anchorite cell defined by my self-encompassing journey to date, along the track that leads away to an un-revealed destination.
If I try to forge ahead by closing my mind to my past, to my failures and my acknowledged weaknesses, I may stumble no more than others who repent yet always remember, and who remember yet never despond, but on stumbling I shall more surely fall, and may be quickly overcome by the will to either stay down or to turn and give up my attempts to follow.
The child in which that ‘first light’ shone is still alive in me, and I must carry him with me every step of the way. Together we have become able to learn from all that is laid before us, taking the teachings of others for confirmation rather than as the source of our knowing. I am nothing if not that child.
'Learn where knowledge is, where strength, where understanding, and so learn where length of days is, where life, where the light of the eyes and where peace.' ( Baruch 3:14 )

The roots are established; the unseen groundwork bears fruit in their stability and in the constant supply of life giving water and nutrients made possible by their search and spread into the depths of their world. The tumescent shoot will carry the benefits and the evidence of this preparation on its journey of growth into the light. Roots and shoot are born of the same seed: they are inseparable, the plant having no ability to grow to fruition without the continued life of its juvenile past. 'Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only a borrowed plumage.' (D.T.Suzuki. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism.)

This wonderful cycle of birth and growth and death, overlaid as it is with an ever-touching, ever-covering and sheltering, overlapping quilt of that same sequence, is a thing of beauty. It is as a slow rise and fall of praise from creation to its Creator: a long sustained ‘Alleluia’ in the heart of mankind, bursting forth in a tearful and heart-rending glimpse of an incomprehensible joy. A fleeting and inexpressible certainty set in the midst of our seemingly broken worlds of disbelief and of grief when confronted with the death of a loved one.

A clear view of this beauty underlying the grey emptiness was granted recently through the news of the death of Peter, a man with whom I and a mutual friend, Richard, used to work. I called at his home to pass on the news. My visit was overdue as I had not seen him or his family for a long time, but as soon as I arrived there was that wonderful feeling of a friendship being re-affirmed as we picked up conversation as though continuing from the day before. Talk of Peter included our awareness of how greatly his life had improved since we first met him, his first forty five years or so having been spent in ‘institutions’, and out of this conversation came the news that Richard’s father had died a few weeks earlier. Having been totally unexpected, this had left him in a place where I had not been; my own father’s decline over some twenty five years, while taking me to the same experience of loss and grief, was clearly without some of the painful corners he could not avoid.
He did not have the opportunity to say any form of goodbye, while I, being around throughout the decline, had been in a position where there had never been any real need for goodbyes. The other striking difference for me was that Richard had been able to speak to me about it; I had been unable to even mention my own father – even to my immediate family – for three long years, and had to walk away whenever others spoke of him.

As a background to our conversation we had the constant delight of happy chatter and interaction between Richard’s three young sons, and the occasional smiling face popping round the door: ‘Daddy, can I ...’, ‘Daddy, what’s this ...’, and, ‘Would you like one of these?’ while presenting me with an unexpected can of drink.
Here was the reason for all that has gone before. The ‘first light’ shines in such children as these, and our place of prominence and influence as parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, Godparents, and loving friends, is for none other than these. They are not just their own future, they are THE future: they are your future and mine, and in the overlap of their growing with our decline, of their living with our dying, we are called upon, not so much to fan the flame as to ensure that we do nothing to quench their awareness of it. In the face of all the distractions of this world, if we can achieve that, then let us pray God wills that it has been enough.

While we lay out all roads and paths before them and step aside, His work will continue unseen within them; we must make way for their freedom in the hands of God.

‘Of its own accord the land produces first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.’
(Mark 4:28)

Roots ...

That which would nourish and build spiritual maturity as the fruition of this life is at the very heart of our existence. We are born with a spiritual seed already within us.

At our conception it is not just the beginning of a physical growth process that, however wonderful, simply brings another living creature into this world. That is the case with the rest of the animal kingdom, and as an evolved and planned part of life’s diversity we share in that process as our own means of reproduction within creation as we know it; but we are more than that: we are men and women, we are humankind, we are the reason for the existence of everything else on Earth, and for the existence of this astonishing planet itself. That fact, if only we had the ‘ears to hear’, would tell us so forcibly that our solar system exists purely for the creation and establishment of a nursery and home for mankind. It is easy to run with the seemingly logical sequence of thoughts that follow on from this – the galaxy for the solar system, the cluster for the galaxy, the known cosmos for the cluster of galaxies – but I believe that to be an arrogant extension of mankind’s present limited capacity to comprehend; not the capacity to understand “something” but to comprehend – Full stop.

We are told that we are created in the image and in the likeness of God. (Genesis 1:26) but I am always failing to grasp this in a way that satisfactorily answers my questions. I do not doubt its truth, but I am unable to take it on board in any sense that provides me with the inner quiet and sense of certainty that is so frequently twinned with total acceptance. I fail to understand what the words mean, but the passage of time has granted me an awareness of two facts derived from that lack of understanding: firstly that the failure is entirely my own, and secondly that it brings home to me the reality of not being able to know all things. In searching for the answers to some of my questions, I have to recognise the limitations of being human. There is much that cannot be worked out and learned with mind alone, and in some areas, like everyone else, I must heed the words of Saint Augustine of Hippo, ‘Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe, that thou mayest understand.’
The ability to believe that I am created in the image of God, without really understanding what that means, is a natural, and perhaps supernatural, extension of all that I have received through my past years of gradually increasing faith. There is so much that was once easily dismissed that is now undeniable. Faith has opened a door for me, the closing of which I could neither imagine nor endure.
What I do understand, is that the essential spark for being made in the image of God is the implantation, the inclusion and the infusion of that spiritual seed into our physical creation. We cannot - neither physically nor as intellectual concept – be conceived as human beings without the touch of that generative and eternal light.

From our earliest days that seed begins to grow, taking in all it needs from the new world into which it has been born, but, at the same time, our mind necessarily fills itself with the information it receives from this world that will enable it to grow and eventually function within it as an entirely independent being. All that is present in the infant’s world will have a bearing on the formation of both the mind and the spirit of the rapidly learning new child, and on the character and spiritual integrity of the adult to be.
The apparent death or disappearance of the spiritual seed goes unnoticed, and to grow up without even the merest hint that anything has been lost is both the most tragic and the easiest thing in the world.
Thomas Traherne wrote of this in his ‘Centuries of Meditations’ (3:7-11)

‘That first Light which shined in my infancy in its primitive and innocent clarity was totally eclipsed ... by the customs and manners of men, which like contrary winds blew it out: by an innumerable company of other objects, rude, vulgar, and worthless things, that like so many loads of earth and dung did overwhelm and bury it: by the impetuous torrent of wrong desires in all others whom I saw or knew that carried me away and alienated me from it: by a whole sea of other matters and concernments that covered and drowned it: finally by the evil influence of a bad education that did not foster and cherish it. All men's thoughts and words were about other matters. They all prized new things which I did not dream of. I was a stranger and unacquainted with them; I was little and reverenced their authority; I was weak, and easily guided by their example: ambitious also, and desirous to approve myself unto them. And finding no one syllable in any man's mouth of those things, by degrees they vanished, my thoughts ... were blotted out; and at last all the celestial great and stable treasures to which I was born, as wholly forgotten, as if they had never been.'

'Had any man spoken of it, it had been the most easy thing in the world, to have taught me, and to have made me believe that Heaven and Earth was God's House, and that He gave it me. That the Sun was mine, and that men were mine, and that cities and kingdoms were mine also: that Earth was better than gold, and that water, every drop of it, was a precious jewel. And that these were great and living treasures: and that all riches whatsoever else was dross in comparison. ... When I began to speak and go, nothing began to be present to me, but what was present to me in their thoughts. Nor was anything present to me any other way, than it was so to them ... All things were absent which they talked not of. So I began among my play-fellows to prize a drum, a fine coat, a penny, a gilded book, etc, who before never dreamed of any such wealth. ... As for the Heavens and the Sun and Stars they disappeared, and were no more unto me than the bare walls. So that the strange riches of man's invention quite overcame the riches of nature, ... nothing is so easy as to teach the truth because the nature of the thing confirms the doctrine: ... '

As well as stating truths about childhood experience, does this not touch our hearts with the awesome responsibility that is parenthood? And does it not hint at the very core of the reason why the death of a child is so utterly devoid of anything that verges on understanding? The death from this world and from our presence is one thing, but the death of a child of God before we have entirely poured into it our love, our frail faith and our life, is a trial which leaves us in a limbo of fear and uncertainty. What more could I or should I have done? I loved within this world, but did I believe enough to give my child the seeds of my faith that it may graft these onto the seed with which it had been born?
Even within the life of the parent who thinks they believe in nothing, there is the unquenchable flicker of that ‘first light’ with which they themselves were born, and in the unrecognized longing of one child of God for the spiritual prosperity and salvation of another born of their own flesh, resides the ultimate revelation of what this life is about, and the pulse of meaning behind the incomprehensible reality of the incarnation of God into mankind: the conception, the birth, the life and the death of Jesus. He was THE Child of God. He was THE man. His death was not His end, nor a continuation of a gradual petering out for mankind; the resurrection of Christ was the beginning of our future.
Such are the thoughts which may never trouble the parent who dies in due season: at a time, also in due season, which allows their children to grieve and to take their turn as the patriarchs and matriarchs of the overlapping God-child generations.

In striving to become the persons we are made to be, we must become aware of the life in that ‘first light’ within ourselves; we must steer away from the ‘dross’ in our lives and be able to discern whether to search and build upon all that has been gifted to us, or recognize and discard our past as having been empty and misleading.

'The person you are depends not on what you can achieve, but on what is given you
- perhaps by the hands that first held you –
the warm hands of your mother, the strong dependable hands of your father,
and on the hands of many people who have given you their gifts all down the years.'
(More from Ten to Eight on Radio 4. Various authors.)

Growth unseen

Growing increasingly comfortable with thoughts of death has brought a corresponding increase in my consciousness of the fact that many people are far from attaining any form of comfort in such thought. There is an external presence that constantly tries to pull me away from the subject as though whispering into my ear that people do not want to hear me, or anyone else, dwelling upon it.

That is indeed understandable, and I have no active intention of dwelling on these things, and certainly no deliberate desire to contradict any request that I should steer away from them; but there is no valid reason for me to (in any way) avoid the subject.
I say that, not from the selfish point of view of believing that ‘this is my own blog and I shall write whatever I like’; ( when considered in isolation, that is a pointless attitude with little about it to convey that there is the wonder of a human mind behind it ), but because the source of suggestions that I should stop is external, and, having been subjected to due consideration, is duly regarded as being of little consequence. All whisperings from outside sources are completely overridden by the inner conviction that I should think and dwell upon those things into which my mind is drawn, those things about which I have a desire to think, and to understand, and to write. That which arises out of such thought is a part of my ongoing experience of overflowing, a brimming over which does not cease and which I believe to be an essential part of my continued growth towards becoming the person my Creator intended: the person He still intends me to be.
Just when I was ready to continue my journey with mind focussed on a different aspect of life, or of the journey itself, walking with Jesus and endeavouring to follow his lead, I have been brought back to further thoughts on loss and grief. Perhaps I am meant to continue my walk with Him in staying with these thoughts; it is not for me to decide the what, the where and the when, but simply to trust and to follow Him, obeying the prompting of the Holy Spirit whenever I feel that inner Presence.

From a natural human viewpoint, I still strain to the limit when trying to understand the death of a child, of whatever age.
In these days of increased longevity even an octogenarian can die while their parent still lives, and few indeed will think of the survivor as having lost a child; but to the living parent the death and the funeral are of none other but their own infant: perhaps someone who had helped and nursed them only to fail first, someone who had brought joy and parental pride in their own prime, who had gifted them with the blessings of grandchildren; someone who had matured into adulthood from an adolescence brimming with uncertainty, and into that adolescent confusion from a childhood of limitless wonder and ambition. The child born of the infant, and the infant born of newborn babe are themselves born of the parents, and that same wondrous life was borne for up to nine months within the womb.
And what of the still-born child? And of the child whose hidden development in its mother’s womb is never completed?
From conception to death a child is a life, is a gift, is a blessing; a child is for life, a child is life, a child is forever a child.

We are all somebody’s child, and regardless of the ups and downs, the losses and gains, the births and deaths, regardless of whether we know who are parents are or were, and however desperately cruel, unfair, miserable or deprived our start in life may have been, or still is, we have an un-severable spiritual lifeline that nourishes us as children of God.
Our umbilical chord was severed at birth when it had completed its task and was no longer needed, but while our physical growth was then able to continue with only external influence, our spiritual growth continues to need the power, security and loving input of a source beyond our comprehension, and which, if we will allow it, will nourish and build us until we reach a spiritual maturity: a transformed and liberated awareness beyond that sometimes fearful horizon we call death.

As we approach our own death we shall, for the last time, be poised in a deeply personal soliloquy at the very edge; and then, with awareness and thought no longer locked within ourselves but bursting into perpetual and total communication with others, into the living presence of Christ, an uttermost absorption of the Holy Spirit, and into the absolute and defining grasp of God, we shall be brought effortlessly into the bliss of infinity which is the ultimate reality of peace and love: a unity in which ‘edge’ is no longer even a word.

‘Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake,
the seed is sprouting and growing; how, he does not know.’
(Mark 4:27)

Untangled

Through encounter with paradox we are touched in some way by what could be described as an intellectual misprint. It may be puzzling, perplexing or pleasing, disconcerting, surprising, amusing; the range of possibility can be neither defined nor confined.
Always there is that heightened sensation produced as a consequence of momentary confusion, a mental response to a contradiction tangled in the unreasonable tendrils of seemingly irrational thought that may give birth to such as the convoluted ramblings you now find yourself reading.
Unexpected complexities of meaning, confusion and contradiction are themselves a paradoxical expectation in these encounters, but the rolling and inverting of meaning is sometimes so layered and overlapped that we can lose all sense of where we are within the paradox. We can even lose sight of the fact that there is a paradox, or, on rare occasions when we are suddenly brought to a point from which we are enabled to see from a wholly new angle, we are brushed by a totally unexpected reaction, and, for a moment at least, we realize that the paradox does not exist. It is merely the word we use for some forms of our failure to grasp the truth: something existing nowhere other than in our stumbling around within our own fragile inadequacies.

For anyone living their life with a thought that there may be more to come, life itself may at times be sensed as a paradox.
For those with an ongoing belief born of faith, those with an inner conviction that existence –in some form– continues beyond the world in which we now live, life is experienced as a paradox.
At times it is clear that an awareness of our own limitations of consciousness and experience makes for an easily registered understanding of the supposed and self-imposed boundary to life and the totality of creation. That self-awareness allows for the simple stepping beyond that boundary to what is still seen only as a void, but which is anticipated as the mature blossoming and the fullness of our existence.

It is not strange that we can be moved into a brighter light, a greater clarity, a deeper understanding, by an event that appears to bring darkness, a clouding over, a deepening gloom that spreads from an already obscured horizon to the eventual loss of all that had once been visible. For those at the heart of the event, the mists of tears and heartfelt numbness envelop and diffuse all that had been held firm and clear in heart and mind and eye, but even for them the warmth and brightness of light longs to fill the emptiness as soon as it appears. (see 18.05.07 posts: ‘Not filled ... but emptied’)
Such was the unexpected touch and the gentle strangeness of my most recent encounter with the paradoxical nature of death and the joy that entwines itself with grief.

The whole experience of receiving news of the death, attending the funeral, meeting extended family members not seen for some years, and all of us making our ways home to our separate lives once more, was different this time.
The outer layers of emotion were the same, but there was an underlying joy that I found impossible to separate even from the stone-in-the-heart feeling that rose and re-rose within: joy born of an overwhelming certainty that, among others, a quartet of souls already gone from this life (Teddy, Norman, Bunty and Alf) had welcomed him home, and that the hilarity and love they enjoyed and shared while living among us was living still. The bonds of love that bound them here remain unbroken and their joyous reunion was shown to be inevitable.
Paradox, conjured from incomprehension, had been untangled and dissolved in the power and the simplicity of love and truth.

The long struggle and physical distress of his decline, so contrary to all earlier memories of this lovely, humour-filled, and -in all ways - “big” man, are now gone. He is the personification of delight once more.

The unforgettable are never forgotten.
God bless you John Brett; glasses shall be raised to you many more times yet.

‘What is the body? - Endurance.
What is love? - Gratitude.
What is hidden in our chests? - Laughter.
What else? - Compassion.’

(Rumi. ‘All Rivers At Once’.)

Separation

It rarely astonishes but is quite astonishing, that we expect a particular group of people to be something other than the ordinary and apparently normal people we comfortably allow ourselves and almost everybody else to be.

By virtue of their title, their presumed vocation and training, and an expectation of a form of separation from ourselves and the rest of run-of-the-mill humanity that results from that same acquired distinction of description, learning or calling, we regard them as something different, unreachable, above and beyond: something superior to ourselves in a way we do not really understand but which many of us never seem to question.
I refer to our priests, vicars, rectors, pastors: any who have become, in one way or another, members of what could be described as the professional class of spiritual leaders: those who preach and spiritually lead and shepherd others as the main occupation and interest in their lives.
The base line for all such people is that they share with us every aspect of our physical existence; they are men and women just as we are, but through their chosen specialization they have become separated from the rest of us in a way that is often more real and more distant than is the apparent difference between, for example, bus-drivers and neurologists, or cosmologists and gardeners.
We can quickly make assumptions, but it is not necessarily the case that a cosmologist is more aware of the complexity and the mysteries of creation than is the gardener, and it is not necessarily so that the neurologist is more intelligent than a bus-driver, nor that such intelligence is better utilized or more productive in the former than in the latter. We separate such people according to their recognized skills and achievements as well as their perceived status, and these separations can be immense, but, at the same time, we still include all such people in the general hold-all of ordinary people. If we had them as neighbours we would not be particularly concerned about such differences; our relationship with them would be dependent upon their personalities and the way they interact with us and others in the everyday happenings of life.

When a life is devoted to God, to religion, to church, to a life of faith, we can become very aware of something other about the person, and this otherness can take them and us in any one of a variety of different directions. The consequences of this can become a wonderful blessing for everyone who knows them but can also be the cause of a drastic severing of all contact, trust and affection. This can occur even while the individual in question continues with the rest of their life apparently unchanged, still going to work and maintaining the outward shape of their usual worldly routines, but when somebody has transformed that devotion into a full time occupation we so easily react with a corresponding transformation in our way of seeing them; we no longer simply regard them as being either blessed or foolish but otherwise still within the limits of what we accept as a wide-ranging ordinariness; instead, we place them apart, as though they have ventured to a place into which we can never follow and from which they can never return. We cease to regard them as normal people.

I find it difficult to imagine a life spent without any form of wondering, questioning and an underlying longing that generates at least some form of spiritual search, but I must assume there are many people whose lives follow this course, and they also live within the normal range of ordinariness. This, however, does not exclude them from an awareness of this sense of otherness, and when we consider those who do ask themselves questions, and who are searching for something but do not belong to any church community, and who are possibly without even a tenuous link to any form of Christianity or other faith, we find ourselves amid the majority of the people we are likely to meet, and here too the distinction is maintained. The priest is set apart.

As someone who has always attended church services, and who has always been blessed by those set apart in the priesthood and who have for a time been my own parish priests, I have become aware of how much I have taken these people for granted at times.
Their presence within our community has been an ongoing blessing, and their humility, piety, reliability and trustability have blended with their ways of teaching and preaching, guiding and edifying, befriending and loving, in ways that have manifested the presence of Christ among us. It has been so easy to recognize them, not just as men apart, but as men of God.

My failure to fully acknowledge this fact in the past has been presented to me as precisely that: my own failure.
I wish I could have become this aware of their true worth by some means other than by way of contrast: without having to endure an apparent lack of such a presence and the destructive effects of that lack on people around me, in someone duly appointed but for whom I am unable to confidently suggest those attributes.
The contrast was greatly highlighted for me on Christmas Day, when, with a determination to avoid all unwanted and inappropriate annoyance and distraction, I returned once again to my fertile ‘home ground’.
The quiet, the peace, the holiness, the saturation in truth and the wonder of Christ’s birth, all brought home, brought to life and brought into the light of day at a dawn mass in a much loved place by a much loved Man of God.

May He who touches me through them pour endless blessings upon the community at Stanbrook Abbey, and upon the fruitful ministry of Fr Hugh Sinclair.
I give thanks for the presence of such places and such servants of God in this troubled world.

And let us pray for all ministers in God’s Church, for those we so easily take for granted, and for those by whom we are so easily troubled, that rather than asking what they can do for us, we may come to know what they most need from us.
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