... 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 ?
.

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.
.

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.
.
Wherever we find ourselves to be, - ‘let us go forward from the point we have each attained.’ (Philippians 3:16)
.

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.”

.

Readiness

So much is involved in that one instruction, to ‘clear the ground that lies neglected’; so much effort for some, so much time for others, so much of both for most of us.
It is the endurance of that effort, and a patient and persistent hope in the passage of time that comprise perseverance: a constant application of commitment from us that allows the constant flow of grace to touch our lives, to enter our consciousness, and to work within our hearts.
Each of us will have both task and trek before we can make our inner ground fully available, but let us look ahead, beyond the edges we shall encounter on the way, to the expectancy awaiting us when we have cleared that ground.

We are ready and we are receptive; we await the seed God wishes to plant within us. We have no way of knowing what He may ask of us, but we are alive in a way we have never before experienced. We are spiritually alert.
Anticipation fills our waking hours, and falling asleep at the end of each day takes on a whole new significance; we feel we may not awake the same as we were the previous day.
The concept of ‘watching’, which may have been unknown to us, or may have been vaguely understood as trying to keep at least a small part of our awareness in touch with the possibility of Christ’s return, is suddenly experienced as a lump-in-the-throat reality.
An overriding sense of unseen but all-pervading power brings, perhaps for the first time, awareness and conviction that we are not masters of our own destiny.
Our free will allows us to decide where we do in fact go, but our real selves, the persons we were made to be, are drawn into a communal desire with the will of God. We are called to a realization of truth, to a manifestation of love, and to a fulfilment of our deepest longing in the following of our Lord’s call.

But having reached this point, having been prepared to follow wherever God may lead us, what then? Where will we go? What will we do? And more disconcerting than either of these concerns, how ever shall we know?
Will we be granted some form of conviction as to the path to take? How will we know to trust the conviction? How will we know the path? Will we take a course that suits our own desires or imagined destiny?
If God provides a guide: if someone arrives in our life - a Spirit filled person to beckon and to lead - will we know them? Will we hear? Will we see? Will we follow? Will we see them in the right light? Or will they become an attraction or distraction in themselves?
Such provision may be simply for support: to enable us to hold firm; but it may be that God is granting us the chance of a relationship that will take us forward in ways we could never have imagined.

The close followers of Jesus – his apostles – were taught by Him in order that they could become the people His Father created them to be: the people He chose them to be. Jesus was their teacher. We also may be blessed with Jesus as our teacher, but the Holy Spirit may grant the provision of a human companion who, for a time, may be our mentor, our teacher in the ways in which God needs us to become competent and effective.
Such was the prophet Elijah to the young Elisha.

Elisha was chosen by God to be Elijah’s successor: to become His prophet after him.
Their meeting (1 Kings 19:19-21) is first seen as the call of Elisha, but is also the fulfilment of God’s instruction to Elijah.
‘… he came on Elisha … as he was ploughing behind twelve yoke of oxen, …Elijah passed near to him and threw his cloak over him. Elisha left his oxen and ran after Elijah. … following Elijah, (he) became his servant.’
It was God’s plan that the two men should meet at this time.
Elijah: the mature man of God, knowing God’s will and acting upon it. He was God’s servant: His prophet.
He had no need of a servant, but Elisha had been chosen by God, and he needed to serve, and to learn. He was not yet ready to serve God as His prophet, but he was ready to follow the man appointed by God to be his teacher; to learn to be in God’s presence, to know His will, to respond to His prompting, and to become the person he had been chosen to be.
Elijah was God’s servant.
Elisha became servant to God’s servant, that he may himself become effective as a servant of God.
By spending time with Elijah, seeds would be sown in the prepared ground of his heart; seeds gathered from the inner harvest of Elijah’s maturity in the presence of God.
Elisha would be formed from the example, teaching and Godly power of his appointed mentor.

Elisha was ready for God to move him.
He was ready to do God’s will; ready for Elijah when he came, and ready to leave everything to follow him.
His inner ground had been prepared and lay ready for God’s leading.
He was found ploughing the land, but God had another plough waiting for him.

In a similar way Jesus called the fishermen, Peter and Andrew, and James and John, away from their boats and nets, saying, “I will make you fishers of people.” (Matthew 4:18-22).
Their inner ground had been prepared; they were receptive, and they were ready.
They too had been ‘watching’, and, without knowing what to expect, had recognized their calling when it came.
As with Elisha, their response was immediate; they followed.

Each of them was called by name: a specific person for a specific place in God’s plan.
We too are called by name.
It is the intimate knowledge of ourselves encapsulated in that calling, that makes it undeniable, unavoidable, and ultimately irresistible.
.

Gardening

Until recently, I have never thought of myself as a gardener.
In the way that I automatically understand the word, I am not a gardener: I have never been a gardener; and yet, more than almost anything else, I love spending time in my garden, and that enjoyment comes, in part, from doing and having done those things which make it the place that it is.
I have become increasingly aware that what I have been doing is gardening in one of its pure forms.
I have never spent time creating a wonderful array of variety and colour: filling flower beds with what, for me, represents hours of devotion in the form of propagation, nurturing and weeding, resulting from a consistently maintained focus on the resulting display.

My appreciation of such things has waned from something never particularly obvious, to an unresponsive reaction summed up in the simple question, “Why?”
It is not that I can see no point to any of the labour required to create such beauty; it is that I do not see the result as a form of beauty high enough to warrant the necessary dedication to its realization. That level of organization and neatness, contrived diversity, and density of population can so easily create in me a form of urban suffocation. In spite of the possibility of finding no other human presence in such surroundings, and despite the undeniable loveliness of almost every individual flower in creation, I can feel buried under my awareness of the human activity involved in this form of creation.

I see that way of gardening as being similar to the placing of substantial value upon such superficial things as cosmetics, and the ephemeral waste that is the fact behind such fictions as the world of ‘fashion’. The gardener within us has been drawn into the generation of artificial needs and desires that fuel the supposed civilization of today’s high speed and value-warping world.
The persuasiveness of publicity and advertising, and the greed of business and commerce, have seduced each other into a marriage bed that spawns an ever increasing destruction of the values and the integrity of being truly human.

There is a power for good in all this activity: great and beneficial things are also conjured from today’s seething mass of potential, but so many of us are becoming all but lost in our inability to resist our susceptibility to the bright, the loud and the colourful.
This apparent inability encourages an ever increasing intensity of promotion of those things we do not need but are unable to do without.
Conversely, a garden has the power to keep us in touch with things we truly do need, but which, for most of the time, we believe we can manage without.

Deep within, I am as much a gardener as the person who spends eight or ten hours of every day producing and maintaining his flower beds and manicured lawns; but most of my hours are spent appreciating my ground rather than having to strive endlessly to maintain its image.
I allow nature to make most of the decisions, and recently this was brought home to me when I realized how the whole layout and feel of my garden has been governed by such things as the way a tree has fallen to the ground, or the seemingly random growth of unsuspected plants that nature has provided. There are shrubs and climbers which have been bought and planted near the house, but more than anything else, I have simply controlled what nature herself has decided to do.

The wonder of being in my own garden is similar to, but is more than, the pleasure derived from the countryside with its wildlife, the fresh air, and the quiet. It is the comfort of being in familiar surroundings which are known and absorbed in the same way that I am absorbed into them: the peace and quiet joy of being truly home in a safe haven, where heart and soul sense their true belonging, and where my awareness of God walking with me can flourish.

The sensation of being close to God in a garden, is a blend of the private and intimate nature of our safe haven, with the work we have put into its formation, and with the reality of His presence with us in all places and at all times.
It is a distant echo of the gardener and his God together in Eden.
It is a powerful hint at the reality of His being our greatest, closest, and most trustworthy friend.

For me, the following words of George Eliot are a fitting description of the way God’s presence in our gardens can be experienced.
It also describes part of the sensation I experience when approaching the edge, and which led me to the heading under which I attempt to convey these thoughts: - ‘Soliloquy at the very edge …’

“Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.”
.

Rain and shine

The clarity of Easter morning, those early hours with the moon bathing coldly in its void, was the commencement of what has been a lengthy period of beautiful and calm weather.
This may have begun some time before, but my memory does not concern itself unduly with such matters until they coincide with something it recognizes as being of importance: something involving my spiritual awareness, and my journey towards that which calls me endlessly towards and beyond the end of my life here in this world.
All thought of what occurred on that Resurrection Day, and what became available to me – to each of us – through the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, focuses my senses on the superficial but potentially symbolic aspects of everyday life.
I say potentially because symbolism only exists in the mind of one who recognizes it.
At times I find meaning and relevance in a wide range of experiences, places, times, words and people, and through its ability to go almost unnoticed (in any meaningful way) by the majority of people, the weather has to be counted among those aspects with a mere potential for further meaning.

In one way or another we tend to take it for granted, whatever it may bring.
If it pours with rain, we comment on it – usually unfavourably - and if the sun is too hot for too long we long for the rain. We may be delighted or depressed by it, fascinated or bored with it, but even our delight and our fascination can be enjoyed in a matter of fact, routine, until-the-next-time kind of way. The weather is there; it was there yesterday, and it will be there tomorrow.

But the awakening echoed in that Easter morning makes the weather’s place in the scheme of things so plain, so simple, so real.
I do not understand its importance or relevance any more than previously, but its significance is somehow autographed across my consciousness by the hand of the Supreme Creative Artist, leaving me enthralled by my own presence within the very basics of physical existence.
The weather, in all its shades, breathes life into the seasons which are themselves the raising and lowering of nature’s heart, and hands, and face, in praise to God.
The seasons cannot exist without each other, and within their ebb and flow, the sunshine gives life only so long as there is rain, and the rain brings life only so long as there is sunshine.
In heat and in cold, in rain and in shine, in darkness and light, in dusk and dawn, each touch, scent, taste, sight and sound becomes a breath within us: a whispered ‘Emmanuel’ – God with us!

It is much repeated that one is never closer to God than when in a garden.
The Genesis story tells us that this is how it was meant to be, with the whole of the Earth as the garden for all mankind.
Eden was planted for both man and God: -
‘The man and his wife heard the sound of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day …’ (Genesis 3:8)
In today’s world, where so much of mankind has turned away from God, and where so much of Eden has been stripped bare, raped and left for dead, it is not by chance that we are stirred into an awareness of a presence in our own private gardens. Amid their quiet comfort and familiar safety, we bring ourselves within reach of a recognition long missing from our lives: - the sound of God walking close to us in the cool of the day.

‘… God took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and take care of it.’ (Genesis 2:15)
Whoever we have been created to become, whatever our individual places in God’s plan, the gardener was born in us from the very beginning. We each come closer to being ourselves when we create or maintain a garden. It is an inbuilt guide as to how we should care for the Earth and all that is in it.
We are called to clear the ground that lies neglected, to prepare and to care for the soil; to plough and harrow, to plant and sow, to reap and glean, to gather the harvest, and to produce a meaningful fruit from our labours.

The whole process is an inner longing which points to our call to seek and to follow, and to work towards the harvest that we can help to germinate in the soul of every person we meet.

.

Awaiting

The night is calm and clear.
An emptiness - from two thousand years ago - reflects in us as the moon hangs naked for all to see: a lifeless silence cloaked in a promise borrowed from the touch of power and light as yet unseen.

A contemplative and an appropriate setting for the darkness in which we have gathered; for the clarity we seek in our anticipation of light and life: for the dawning of the day into which we shall be led by the priest and by the community; for the reinforcement of a binding together of living and dead in one loving and timeless whole: - today’s nuns assembled with their deceased companions, as the Easter fire is kindled amid a joyful choir of graves.
They are still; we all are still, and each of us knows that He is the Son of God.

Once again, I am on home ground, where preparation began: where the seeds of both my contentment and my longing were sown.
I have come back to Stanbrook Abbey for the Easter Vigil.
No midnight service here … We had assembled at 4:15 am to celebrate the Resurrection of Our Lord.
From darkness to light, and out into a misty morning sun; with dew bejeweled grass underfoot.
With birdsong and smiles for company.
With the risen sun proclaiming the risen Son.
With a heightened sense of God’s touch in all things.
With a renewed awareness of the presence of the risen Lord in the heart of each one of us.

There is no other time.
There never has been any other time.
Now is the time.
Now is the time to be born, to live, to die, to be reborn.
Now is the time to yield to the embrace of salvation: to melt in the arms of redemption; to believe, to follow, to surrender to the ultimate meaning of our lives: to give our all to the source of all life: to give our life, in whatever way He wills.

This was one of those rare and wonderful times, when I became aware that I could give up my life in that moment: yield all that I knew as myself to the Eternal Unknown.
In the company of my wife, my living friends in the community, and in company with those who may have known me far better than I ever knew any of them, including Dame Gertrude Brown, who, for the first time lay amid her friends in those quiet graves.
She had been so delighted at the thought that I believed myself to have been conceived on the day she become a nun at Stanbrook.
Until I had spoken with her, I could not have imagined anyone being truly excited at the prospect of their own death.
I thank God for enabling me to meet her joy in this world; He alone knows how great is her joy with Him.

How I have been carried away by thoughts of that dawning!
Little wonder that it took a while to settle into the peace in which I had been called to rest.
I am now there … Thank you, dear, risen Lord.

“… a smile in the mind that furrows the brow beneath the mop that raggles the head of the beggar asleep under whispering rain.”
Mine is that mind; mine the solitary quiet amid nature’s baptism; - I am that beggar.
I thank you and praise you for the smile you have lodged deep within me.
You have exquisitely filled me to overflowing, and I am breathless in anticipation of your constant beckoning … “Come, follow me.”

May your dream become reality in me, and in all whom you seek to do your will.
Reveal yourself to us, that we may follow.
Call us, that we may serve.
Lead us to the very edge, that we may meet you there.
.

Waiting

Preparation was the keyword for Lent: that period leading up to Holy Week, to Christ’s Death, and to His Resurrection.
Easter is what makes us Christians. Without it we are nothing.
Without it there was only a man: there was no Christ, there is no Christ, Christianity is nothing.
Preparation - symbolizing Jesus’ forty days spent in the wilderness before beginning His public ministry – preparation for the commemoration and celebration of the fulfilment of God’s plan for Jesus, and, through His obedience to that plan, for all mankind: - for you and for me.

That theme has shadowed me for the last two months, and though my last recorded thoughts have been the briefest reminders of that which filled the three great days of Easter, the need for groundwork - that ongoing preparation of my inner self for the reception and germination of whatever seeds God may sow therein – led me into those days, and, in a remarkable way, has led me through to the other side.
Remarkable in that it has put me down in what so clearly seems to be an unchanged state.
I am so aware of this; I am almost afraid of this.
I had not expected or anticipated anything; in a way I had even assumed that I would arrive beyond Easter without anything having changed.
That appears to be what has happened, but I really had not been ready for this ever-growing awareness of the fact that it has happened.

I spent time walking towards the edges that Lent always places before me; not a frightening experience, as I have come to know those edges a little better over the years, but always troubling, frequently sorrowful, and inevitably a source of feelings of humiliation and inadequacy.
They are the same ones: the familiar but ever disturbing external ones encountered in trying to follow Jesus right to the very end, and the shameful repetition of my own internal failures when, on sensing that He is calling me to follow, I leave Him to walk alone once more.

Throughout this period, preparing the ground has been my underlying focus.
It has been the basis for all that has filled me through the days of Easter, and yet, I feel prompted to open my awareness to more random leadings – after all, this is what the journey has always been like for me: an experience of twists and turns, which, though following a consistent course, feels far more haphazard and aimless during the experience.
Hindsight later reminds me what a good friend it can be, by allowing me to recognize the clear path I have been following.

But here I am, held fast in this spot, having gone nowhere, and anticipating being unable to move for the foreseeable future.
( I should know better. I should anticipate nothing, while being ready for anything. )
A large part of me is ready to grasp at whatever thoughts come my way, to use them as a supply line for whatever I may write in the next few posts, while the other part of me senses a need to rest here: to wait on The Lord; to remain prepared, watching, alert for whatever He may ask of me.

I am writing this as I think, and have become aware that I am steadily settling back into a more peaceful frame of mind.
I feel the situation is being resolved for me, though I am not used to communicating this to others almost as it happens, if at all.
This is not having arrived back in the same place to know it for the first time; this is to have returned there in a state of less certainty than when I previously left it – and without having been away.
.
“Speak, Lord; for your servant is listening.” (1Samuel 3:10)
.

Easter Sunday

Good Friday

Maundy Thursday

Groundwork

Preparing the ground must come first.

When we are ready, and God leads us to where He most needs us to be, we can hope to put our hand to the plough.
But first we must prepare ourselves.
We will be unable to begin, unable even to find the ploughshare, let alone a source of power with which to make use of it, until we are awakened to the guidance of the Spirit of God within us.
The ground within ourselves must be worked, and for this there is no plough, no oxen, no harrow.
These will be formed from the person still buried deep beneath our worldly outer selves.
Before we can even begin, we have to dig deep into ourselves; uprooting thickets of thorn, tearing out tussocks of coarse grass, clearing away the rocks, the brambles and matted weeds to expose our fertile but hidden soil.
Only then can our inner ground itself be turned; and all this must be done with nothing but our bare hands.

We are as Adam.
“By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground as you were taken from it.” (Genesis 3:19)
We were all born in Eden, and through Adam’s fall away from God, we all shrank away from the awareness of His presence.
Paradise was lost; a forbidden awareness gained.
This is where our striving begins; with the climb back into the presence of God: leaving the hiding place into which Adam led us all.

If we have begun to reclaim our basic consciousness of where we were created to be, we can - ‘by the sweat of your face’ – transform our hearts and minds sufficiently for them to become receptive to the word of God.
And God has given us – all of us – regardless of how far we have strayed from Him, the means to find our way back: the means to follow that word.
He made His word a living form that we might use our earthly senses - in the exercise of which we are so well practiced – to hear, to see, to touch, and thus to learn, to turn, and to return to our place with Him.
Jesus was born into the world; God’s Word was made flesh.

Our gradual awakening: our building and dwelling on the nebulous awareness within until it begins to fan the deeply buried ember of faith, is the unravelling, the laying bare, and the making good which readies us for following Him.

“Clear the ground that lies neglected, do not sow among thorns.” (Jeremiah4:3)
.

Called by name

It is our developing awareness of God that generates our need for recognition.

It is growth in that awareness which prevents our stagnation in a purely self-centred desire.
Living in the presence of God brings a metamorphosis from the self, and a coalescing of our needs into one all-encompassing longing: - a longing to take our place within the stream of love.
To give as well as to receive, to console and to be consoled, to heal and be healed, to carry and be carried; to take our place on the path that leads up through the mists, into the stillness and the high mountains where we shall be taken to the very edge, and, ultimately, to within touching distance of our Lord’s cloak, the hem of which wafts past us each time we turn to face Him.
From this holy ground we shall carry the seeds of that which we seek, and return to the plains, there to cultivate the soil within ourselves until ready to plough and to harrow where God wills: - in the places we were destined to be.
And then, at His command: - whatever, wherever, whenever, however, whoever – to sow those seeds.

We live within a lifelong paradox of being infinitely far from Him who is always right here beside us; of being touched by the untouchable; of always finding it a struggle to move closer to that which is our deepest desire; of always failing where we yearn to follow His ways.
Peace can only come as a product of the gentle flow of God’s love through us, and it is in search of our place within that eternal stream that we become disciples: we become His followers, and we join with the group of travellers along the way to bring awareness of His proximity and His touch to others.
In doing so, we avail ourselves of a new possibility; our gifted fellow travellers may include one who brings the very insight and touch we need for the continuation of our own journey.

We have been drawn towards Him.
We may not have heard directly, but we were called; He called us and we responded, and our response has made the call clearer to us.
“You have called me by my name. I hear you Lord.”
An awareness of having become one of The Found has brought its own gifts. These will vary according to our needs and to their relevance to the person we are discovering within ourselves, but one gift will be common to us all: -
we are now also among The Named. (4th & 6th January posts)

We could so easily rest in this place.

If, in any way, we have travelled an appreciable distance, whether in our faith, our relationships, our trust, our forgiveness, our repentance, - in whatever way may be relevant to our own personal spiritual and temporal lives - the change may be great enough to have already eased a considerable burden, or to have raised a comparatively trouble-free but featureless life to a new-found brightness and potential vitality.
We have not been called simply to give us the recognition we need: to enable us to hear the words “I know you”, and to tuck them away somewhere as though they were a membership card or a season ticket; something we can take out and listen to again whenever we like: something downloaded onto our MP3 player, or maybe even used as a ring tone on our mobile.
No, we are called to follow Him.
We are called to be His disciples, and to be ready to hear Him whenever He calls us to hear, to see, to do, to stay, or to go; whenever he calls on us to love.

If we do not feel we have moved from where we started, we can be assured that our very interest in progressing in our faith is enough to work within us. We each have our own paths to follow within the journey we are all called upon to make, and much may need to be unravelled, laid bare or made good.
This may take time, but our worth is not measured in quick results.
It is realized only in becoming the person we were born to be, and thus in doing whatever God may intend to ask of us.
We have only to follow and to be open to the working of the Spirit of God within us.
If my whole place in this world is centred on being able to respond correctly to God’s word for only one moment, in another forty years time, I can only hope and pray that when the time comes I shall be in the right place, fully prepared, and ready to respond according to His will.

If our journey so far has brought any form of loss, of desolation, or of misery, hold fast; believe in Him.
Once again, Lay it all before Him.
Share the truth with Him, that He may share His truth with you.
Make every sorrow and every thought a prayer.
Trust that He alone knows what is needed for us, and from us.
The unravelling may well be very painful. Perseverance will prove it to also be very fruitful.
I say this in the knowledge that my own experience of being emptied and refilled formed the bedrock of my present sense of peace and overflowing, however dimmed and restricted that sense may still be.

… ‘Samuel! Samuel!’
Samuel answered, ‘Speak, Lord; for your servant is listening.’ (1 Samuel 3:10)
.

Recognition (1)

Within each of us there is a deep need for recognition.

This is not the desire for publicity or adulation, congratulation or promotion, that, at times, can clearly be seen flowing through individual lives, but for the simple recognition of our inner selves: that aspect of our presence which, despite the depth of our wishes, remains carefully hidden from most, if not all the people we meet; perhaps even from ourselves until our awareness was awakened.
From the most extrovert to the most introvert, from the flamboyant, exuberant and dominant, to the reserved, reticent and subservient, the need is the same.

It is a longing that constantly buoys us up on the tide of confusion and inadequacy that carries us beyond the edges of our realization. No sooner have we adjusted to some small change of position, than we find ourselves drawn into further confusion and doubt, and thus towards another edge; yet we are still upheld.
With little or no comprehension of what is happening, our very longing seems to hold us in a form of safety.
This underlying need, which aches its way through our mixed emotions, is an irrepressible inner response to something we are still unable to define, but in which we are now unable to disbelieve.
Something has gripped us, and its presence – though not preventing them - overrides all our fears.
It sketches within us a greater realization, a growing fullness, and a promise of fulfilment and completion.

Our longing is both need and desire.
We desire to be known for who we are, even before we have begun to realize that knowledge for ourselves.
The depth of our need is constant, but our recognition of it – if we will but set out on our journey - grows throughout our lives.
The deeply buried ember that became part of us as a result of the creative spark at our conception, glows increasingly as we discover who we truly are, and who we have been created to be.

Embedded within creation itself, and thereby within each one of us, is the basic awareness that we have been considering: the awareness of something more, something other, something greater. An awareness of a presence; a reclaimed consciousness which is our instinctive response to the universal love we (far too dismissively) call God.

We long to be loved, and we long to love the source of that love.
We long for love to flow endlessly to us and into us, but this will never bring true peace unless our desire for recognition is satisfied. That recognition lies in the blending of the love which flows to us and into us, with the longing for love to flow from us and out of us.
The profound reality of love, and of the peace which it offers, is that it is never restricted, it is never confined, and it is never still.
It lives and it moves.

It lives within us only when we fully understand the nature of our desire: when we long, not for love to flow to us or from us, but to flow endlessly through us. A reciprocal process allowing our love to be constantly renewed and returned to its Creator, while His love overflows from within us to the needs of the world at large.
.

Always beyond

We can only see where we are when it has become where we were: when we have moved on.
It is only in looking back to where we have been that we can see that place clearly.
While there, we were unable to imagine another place further on, as we were already somewhere we could not previously have imagined. It is not that we try to imagine and fail, it is that the very idea that there may be more, does not, and cannot occur to us.

When we are already taken out of and beyond ourselves, placed outside the limits of our experience and understanding, we have no landmarks by which we are able to judge our position; no recognizable footholds or handholds we can use to hold firm while we attempt to judge our direction of travel, and without which we can find nothing on which to build any sense of security.
We struggle to find our bearings within the newness that has enveloped us.

Where are we? What is this place? And what is our place within this place?
All we can be sure of is that we have moved in relation to our past.
Our present will always stand upon the foundation of our past, but in our spiritual journey all the knowledge, awareness and realization that had, until now, been our present, can seem lost. As with our temporal life, our past is the groundwork for our present, but there is no neatly recorded progression to our present position: no recognizable pattern of steps that has led us here; no memory of the last part of our journey. All that we had been - the safety of our presence within a present perceptibly formed from our past - has fallen away to become part of that past.

Stepping out in faith will bring us to the edge, but sometimes, just when we dare to open our eyes to see how close we have come, we find there is no edge: we have been taken beyond it. Without any of the half-anticipated emotions, we have been placed in this entirely new place. The edge we had been moving towards is somewhere behind us; we never arrived there: we never saw it. It is as though it had never existed.
We may be in no position to learn it at this time, but this speaks of an important truth: - the edge itself is of no real consequence.
What we seek is always beyond.

There is a possibility that every stage of our journey towards God will feel like this, that each move forward will bring an (at first) incomprehensible change to our comfortable and accustomed level of awareness. The change may even be so great that we believe ourselves to have arrived at our destination. We have not, and the experience and feeling of this new awareness, whether leading us towards an apparent misery or ecstasy, is not one in which to linger, and still less one to hope for.
Without doubt the experience will be undeniable, but it is merely a confusion born of our utter ignorance of that which we approach.

Though our movement, in relation to the distance between present knowledge and full understanding, is as climbing a tree to get a closer view of the moon, the change may seem immense, and the feelings disconcerting.
We have been accustomed to looking at the moon with our feet planted firmly upon solid ground, but now, perhaps having never climbed a tree before, we find ourselves in the higher branches in the dead of night. We do not know how we got here, and we have no memory of having climbed the tree. We are clinging on desperately, not daring to look down and hardly daring to look up at the very thing which drew us here in the first place. The whole experience is entirely new to us.
If we had been able to imagine ourselves in this place, (which we were not), we could only have estimated the experience by looking up at the trees; we could not have anticipated the reality of clinging to a branch high above the ground, in the dark, on a wild and windy night. We had not anticipated the wind, and had no way of understanding how much these high branches would move with it.
We are swept and deeply stirred by the breath of the Holy Spirit;
- and for all the disruption, the moon looks no closer.

In this are pointers to two more important truths: - each small approach may bring wholly unimagined changes to our awareness and understanding, and, despite this seemingly large jump and rapid advance, the possibility of seeing God face to face remains infinitely far from us.

At best the experience will distract and delay us; at worst it will bring our advance to a permanent standstill.
Just as the first steps are always taken before we consciously take the first step, so may we be halted long before our consciousness grasps the fact that we have stopped.
This pattern may be repeated several times, possibly many times, before we suspect that we have not in fact arrived, and that we shall not have done so when the next change occurs, and nor the one after that.

We must walk towards a realization of our comparative insignificance, and a growing understanding of just how little is the distance we have come when revealed against the void that still lies between us and our place with God.

.

“it is impossible to fathom the marvels of the Lord.
When someone finishes he is only beginning,
and when he stops he is as puzzled as ever.”

(Ecclesiasticus (Si) 18:6-7)

.

Beyond understanding

Twice in recent times, immediate neighbours and friends have experienced the devastation of arriving suddenly and unavoidably at one of the life-moments all parents hope never to experience; they have been brought to the very edge.
They have been confronted with a long free-fall into an abyss where all understanding, all peace, and all stability are shredded into an ungraspable and meaningless haze: a mist that thickens as certainly and as unstoppably as water finding its own level, until their very existence has become as a void within a drained and crumpled shell.
A muffled and slow-motion quality overlays the inexplicable continuation of day-to-day activity in the world around them.
How can people be carrying on as though nothing has happened?
Surely the whole world knows and everyone else is hurting too?
How desperately alone we can feel in our grief.

There is no going back.
They have found themselves in a new place from which there is no return.
Little did they suspect that the desert experience of Lent would become so very real.
Little did I that I would be brought back to thoughts of such edges so soon, or in such a way. (1st January post)
Both have lost a son.

Marlene and Roy continue to endure their loss through the sudden and (at first) inexplicable death of their son Darren.
Theresa and Peter, whose son Andrew died two weeks ago, are still lost in that abyss.
While the world looks like a wilderness to them, the long and slow process of healing will seem unlikely to begin; but even within their pain I see the trust - and even joy - born of faith, refusing to be beaten down and trampled in the mire of their grief.
Their awareness of God’s presence is what makes the difference; the smallest touch prevents their loss sliding into total desolation and despair.

From conception to death these sons’ lives have been lived.
They came to the world through their parents’ love and have now returned to the source of their being.
With every birth and every death we are reminded of the eternal links between the two, and the following words of Carlo Carretto express the wonder that is life in a new-born child, and also the root cause of the grief felt by parents whose expectation would have been to predecease their children.

'If we wished to sum up the relationship that should exist between man and God, if we wished to give as exact an example as possible of the trust on which the peace of those who live in the mystery of God depends, we could not do better than point to the infant sleeping in the strong arms of its mother, close to the womb of its being, safe under the watchful eye of the person who gave him his existence and who thought of him before he ever was.’ ...

'When a father gazes into the innocent eyes of his son, he will, if he looks carefully, see the mystery of the infinite, of the unfathomable, of the ungraspable. He will feel that even though this little body belongs to him, because it was born from his blood, it comes from a distant world, from infinity, from God. God created him at the very moment when man desired a son, and in the unity of love saw him as it were issuing forth from the chaos of non-being. For an instant man has shared in God's creative joy and has touched the infinite.' ... ( from 'Love is for Living' )

May they, and all departed sons and daughters rest in peace.
.