Speaking out

One of the recurring themes of my spiritual journey has been that it occasionally seems to come to a stop. Not a full stop, and never giving any sense of completion nor of failure to achieve the aims of the journey, but rather as though I have stepped upon a ‘pause button’ during my walk. The urge to continue is heightened by my apparent inability to do so, and that inability is locked in with an inner struggle which, whatever the particular details at the time, is invariably born of the same underlying choice: - to speak out or to remain silent.

Within the last twelve months this has happened four times, each with its own distinct subject matter, and, as well as having learned that there are times when remaining silent seems absurd, but during which that silence is required as part of a compliance with Our Lord’s instruction to trust Him, there are other occasions when failing to speak out and generally shunning any form of publicity contradicts our longing and our professed intention to follow Him.

When I first sat down to begin thinking about posting to this blog, I was battling with that same choice; do I actually go ahead with it, or do I give in to my nervous confusion over making my thoughts known? Do I venture forth, taking what felt like an enormous step into the unknown, or do I rapidly retreat into being the quiet, reserved and for the most part hidden person that I more naturally am? That I took the step is now clear for all to see, but is particularly clear to myself. It was meant to be, and I am sometimes astonished by the cumulative effect of the words I have written. The soliloquy has been going on for years, and much of it has been at the very edge, but in having brought some of it to the written page I have begun to make more real and meaningful that which had tended to have a nebulous dreamlike quality.

I have recently been in a similar do-I-don’t-I situation over making myself more known. In fact I do not mean that at all; what I have said in my profile still stands. It is the blog itself, and the thoughts contained therein that I wish to make more known. Experience has taught me that sitting in silence waiting for others to come with the very things we most need leads to a long lonely vigil. There is a place for such things in life, and there will be times when that may be asked of us, but in the busy marketplace with stallholders calling and chattering all around, we can not expect to make ourselves known, let alone sell our wares to those who may be looking for them, by sitting silently in the background. We must at least give ourselves the chance of being found by those who may enjoy and benefit from what we offer. The need for the promotion of all that is good in the marketplace must never be forgotten, for the presence of all that is bad (and the myriad forms of compromise) continues undiminished.

'For words flow out of what fills the heart. Good people draw good things from their store of goodness; bad people draw bad things from their store of badness'(Matthew 12:34-35)

Hence my recent decision to add this ongoing stream of words to more lists of what is available.
Having made the decision not to remain too silent, I can rest in the knowledge that others are now, as it were, speaking out for me.
.

With us still

We all love good stories, but the satisfaction we derive from them, whether intellectual, emotional, or moral, tends to bring all enjoyable and meaningful tales within the bounds of the same mental storehouse. This does not involve any drastic adjustments, bending or pruning, as there is always plenty of room in which to file new stories, or new versions of old ones, and for almost every story we can imagine this means we retain it in all its detail and complexity. Any part or facet we fail to recall must be attributed either to inadequacies of our memory or to inattention when the story was being told.

With the passage of time, however, I have become increasingly aware that there is one story I have never quite been able to file away in its entirety. I have heard it over and over again and have thought myself familiar with it, not with every word perhaps, but with its overall shape and direction and with its most important details.
It is the story of Jesus, and, more than anything else, what this Easter has left me with is the knowledge that however often I hear the story, I still fail to know it: however familiar I am with it, I still fail to really understand it. I have failed to grasp the awesome truth of what God has done for mankind as a whole and for each and every one of us as individuals. Even when my faith is at its peak: when I most feel that I really do believe that God ‘gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life’ (John 3:16), I know that I have missed the point again, and must hear the story told once more; I must listen, and read, and pray, and reach out for the fullness of comprehension that evades me still.

My inadequacy is not just the obvious consequence of trying to take in the whole story in one go - I know that to be impossible - it is my inner response to the smallest of chapters, sometimes to a single verse. The first and last parts of the tale are told and retold, and few people have not heard them, but my understanding of them is so vague and superficial. The Christmas and Easter stories stand like solid bookends in our minds and we have filed them away as stories with all the others. That is our mistake; they are not just stories, they are truth. They are not just true stories, they are way beyond the compass of the word ‘story’.
Both have to do with God being present with us: God with us – Emmanuel.

However little I grasp and retain of what He and His followers tell us in His story, He is with us; that I do not doubt.
That is what I hold onto as though my life depended upon it.

Why? – Because it does.
.

Resurrection Day

Emmanuel

Α

.

The silent anonymity of conception
Self-abnegates, as life utters
Into harmony with flesh and bone:
Grown onto rootstock of creation's own
Irrepressible fountain of possibility.

Diversity pulsates to the beat
Of the eternal drum,
cascading truth and certainty.

God's dream becomes the waking womb;
"I am" is echoed in all things,
And, in the silence,
Being sings its throbbing song
And trembles into life.
.

.
Silent improbability: resurrection;
But in a thought, true life flutters
Into harmony with flesh and bone:
Grown onto rootstock of creation's own
Inexpressible fount of impossibility.

Eternity pulsates to the beat
Of the Creator’s drum,
confirming truth and certainty.

God's dream becomes the waking tomb;
"I am" re-echoes in all things,
And, in the darkness,
Being sings its throbbing song

Assembled into light.

.Ω

© Paul Amphlett 2007

Good Friday

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Maundy Thursday

It is a quiet day, somehow saturated in a gentleness like whispering rain.
For me, it seems to hum with the underlying presence of eternal power that is the Spirit of Creation, in ways that reach out and almost touch the world around me. It is as the single droned note behind some of the heart-touching music of this life, without which that music would be superficially delightful but lacking all potential for drawing sobs of grief and joy from our hearts.
With Easter being so early this year, today is also the first day of Spring, and it is not easy to cast such things aside. It is of no real consequence and has no real meaning - the buds and shoots in gardens and countryside appear the same today as they did yesterday - but it generates its own feelings of expectation: something is in the air. Growth continues, imperceptible when viewed moment by moment, but taking today’s reality as the foundation for tomorrow’s hope in an unstoppable journey towards fulfilment and the bearing of fruit.

It is a quiet day: a day of comfort. It is a day of thanksgiving for what we have received, of appreciation for the support and the solace, for the strength and the consolation which is found in being a Christian. It is the day when we recall the foundation of Christ’s Church, and when our minds are carried back to a gathering of friends two thousand years ago.
The Eucharist was born this day. Our present priesthood was born this day.
Jesus had trained and taught his followers, grooming the twelve Apostles for their task when He would no longer be with them, and now, having prayed for them, He did something that (for me at least) gives rise to the droned note that underlies the whole day: He prayed for me.

“I pray not only for these
but also for those
who through their teaching will come to believe in me.”
(John 17:20)

I believe in Him through my own faith born of wondering and questioning, doubt and uncertainty, solitude and experience, but that has all been grounded in the teaching of parents, friends, teachers, religious and priests throughout my life. This whole process and network of faith, for all of us, is founded upon the work of the Apostles: we have come to believe in Him through their teaching.

That Jesus prayed for me and for you, for all our family and friends - living and dead - who have come to believe in Him, is a source of great strength when we fully grasp what that means, and having no less an impact are His next words when He prays “May they all be one ... so that the world may believe it was you who sent me.” (17:21), and again in verse 23, “may they be so perfected in unity that the world will recognize that it was you who sent me and that you have loved them as you loved me.”
How can we expect the world to come to believe in Him when the vast number of subdivided denominations of Christianity speak so loudly of disunity.

It is a quiet day: a day of prayer.
In thanksgiving, let us remember those priests who have played a part in our own spiritual journeys, and let us pray for all priests who today renew their vows.
Let us add our prayer to their own, that they may be renewed and sustained in their receptiveness to God’s grace and in the security and inner peace of an unquenchable faith; may they constantly manifest and express the gifts of humility and unity - the two qualities by which mankind shall most easily be drawn towards the truths they strive to convey and spread in the world around them.

May God grant each of us an awareness of our own responsibilities in sharing the gifts we have received. Just as we have come to believe through the example and teaching of others, so may our own lives draw others to believe.

.

St Patrick's Day

‘... Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly ...’

.

.

.

.

.

.

(W. B. Yeats. Easter 1916.)

Passing through

‘The stairs of a staircase have naught to do with the top of it and the abode to which it leads, yet are means to the reaching of both;’ (St John of The Cross. Ascent of Mount Carmel.)

We so readily immerse ourselves in the experience of sensation generated by spiritual and religious routines, habits and convictions, that we risk failing to recognize the part this plays in weakening, or even completely negating, our desire for union with God.

The damage is so easily done because our immersion - both emotional and intellectual - does not result from a conscious decision, but from an all-pervading failure to understand the extent to which we are apart from Him. St John was writing of ‘meditations, forms and ideas’ which must be utilized as steps or stages to be passed through and discarded on the road to contemplative prayer and ultimately to the unitive state, ‘since they have no resemblance and bear no proportion to the goal to which they lead, which is God.”
Our journey must not be allowed to become the object of our journeying, Our desire must not be for the continuance of desire but for its complete fulfilment. But how do we recognize such fulfilment?
There are no preset stages to be attained along the way: no equivalent to the gaining of credits toward the attainment of a degree or professional qualification: no measurable sequence of steps from start to finish – from the foot of the staircase to the top step, and to the destination which from the beginning has drawn us onward.
There is no shortage of guidance, advice and teaching available from writers and speakers who range from the most experienced and professional to the most unaware and amateur; and here nothing is clear-cut either, with professionalism having no reliable link with experience and awareness, and the absence of them not necessarily producing a perceived amateur status.
Even the most advanced and respected of mystics such as St John of The Cross and St Teresa of Avila have found it necessary in their attempts to describe the indescribable, to portray progress and advancement in a series of stages. In this way they have extended our understanding and awareness of our journey but nothing about it can be handed to another as a step by step guide, a road map or sequential check-list. We can be encouraged or discouraged by such things, depending on our own enthusiasm, desire, past experiences, hopes and fears, and ultimately on our own deeply buried level of faith in the validity of the journey, but to take these expressions of other people’s experience as a hard and fast rule, or as a ‘how to’ guide for our own advance, is to lose sight of where we are meant to be going. It is to lose sight of the unchanging fact that we cannot see our destination. It is also to make the erroneous assumption that we are actually where we imagine ourselves to be in our journey towards God. Wherever that may be is almost certainly where we are not; we are somewhere on the staircase and it matters not where so long as we are there, striving and longing to move forward.

Let us thank God for it, and, with every new day, ‘let us go forward from the point we have each attained.’ (Philippians 3:16)

No point along the way must be allowed to become other than a temporary dwelling place, and while we gain shelter, warmth, safety and encouragement from each place of rest, and from the help and guidance found there, we must inhabit it as we would a bothy when day is done, when cloud obscures the peaks and mists begin to fill the glens.

Just as foolhardy as striding out along a corrie-lip at such a time in a bid to reach a distant and unseen home, is venturing nearer to our spiritual and emotional edge when our journey is already swirling mists within us. The bothy is there for us; at the moment of our need it offers its open door and becomes our own haven. It is God’s provision for us. We light a fire with wood gathered by others, perhaps even needing that first spark of life from the dry matches carefully left for those in need. We make a meal from food left by others who have passed this way, and settling down for the night, we begin to read from among the books they have provided ... and perhaps we have been joined by another wanderer of the hills. Now is the time to read and to listen, to ponder and to wonder, to allow the mists within to become still and then to clear.
Morning brings safety to our steps, but in moving on we take nothing substantial with us; what we have heard and learned and gained will not fit neatly into whatever lies beyond the next ridge. We take the shape and the memory of the experience for blending into the inner soil that nurtures our tender shoots of wisdom, and we replace what we have used before we leave '... in the hope that there is some truth here worth the telling; or, if not that, tinder at least to catch the sparks of another man's fire.' (R. A. Knox. Enthusiasm.)

One day another traveller will lean on what we have left, just as we have leant and rested on the forethought of one who went before.

‘... a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.’
(Robert Frost. The Tuft of Flowers.)

Single track

‘Unity’ is a deceptively simple word for something repeatedly shown to be particularly difficult to achieve.
It encapsulates so much more than the product of our superficial understanding, and of our subsequent willingness to equate it with an apparent lack of disunity.
In one form or another, an awareness of the need for a fundamental form of togetherness awakens whenever I pause to appreciate something, to think on some question that demands further thinking, or whenever my mind succeeds in creating space within it.
I have become increasingly aware of the call to unity seemingly, and repeatedly, riding upon my trains of thought, and, though there seems no obvious limit to the variety of directions in which my thoughts carry me, they all appear to lead towards the same destination. It has become clear to me that the call to unity does not in fact ride upon my trains of thought, but, unlike the thoughts themselves, is an invariable part of my mind’s journey, almost as though it is the train itself.

This is the thinking that has brought clarity and simplicity to the previously unrecognized truth that unity is what underlies everything that is good. And yet it has not come through thinking; it has always been there, gently rising through the layers of my awareness to the surface of my understanding. The thinking has only become necessary as a much needed tool in my attempt to convey my understanding onto these pages. Without it I would be unable to begin, and even with it the process can sometimes feel like trying to haul something heavier than myself out of quicksand.
The call to unity is a pivotal aspect of God’s calling of each of us to Himself. It is His beckoning and drawing of us that carries everything else. The call to unity provides the focal point towards which our trains of thought should lead, and it is what holds it all in place, what gives us both the ability to keep on the straight and narrow, and the opportunity to return to it when we have loosened our grip and gone off the rails. The call to unity is the track upon which the train travels; without it, it is going nowhere fast, but with it, it moves towards the unseen destination planned for it. Whether hurtling or trundling, it is on track.

In this way we are each called to have a ‘one track mind’. That expression is usually used in the context of thoughts and attitudes which are regularly at the forefront of our minds, resulting in frequent and sometimes inappropriate displays of a mindset we are unable to suppress. Here we have the opposite; an essential way of thinking and feeling and doing and being, that would bring us all together in harmony: an inbuilt longing that we barely recognize, but which underlies our whole lives and is a central part of the destination for all humanity.

Unity is more than an absence of violence and obvious aggravation, more than the suppression of all discontent which could otherwise lead to some form of conflict, and more than acceptance of diversity, contradiction and difference. The reality of our calling is not to the nodding acquaintance of tolerance, nor to the smile of acceptance; it can not be satisfied by the loose-knit communities in which we live, and nor can it be achieved in the fostering and maintaining of our frequently sterile and stationary friendships. Indeed it is not an absence of anything, it cannot be achieved through the suppression of anything, and its lamp will never be seen to shine if its only generative power-source is mere acceptance.

In general terms, the day-to-day lives of peaceable people are lived in an atmosphere of semi-isolated dullness; by minding our own business and expecting others to mind theirs, we remain untroubled by glaring differences which, in other circumstances, would provide a constant cause of frustration and ill-feeling between us. Nearly all of us have friendships of some kind and it is these, grafted onto our familial ties that compensate for the dullness and make us believe that all is well with the world. These relationships also provide the counterbalance for the worse than average happenings around us: events that, through the support gained through these links, are prevented from dragging us down too far into discontent or unhappiness. We never doubt our own possession of the truth, and we think we know how everyone else should see the world and all that lies within its apparent confines if we are to relax into a feeling of safety and contentment in each other’s presence and in each other’s company: if we are to create, inhabit and enjoy what we imagine to be unity.

There is an undeniable unity in death – whatever our outlook and understanding of the word – though my writing of that basic fact has brought a feeling of unease through awareness of some of the news items heard about in recent weeks. It is a unity that will come to us all when it will, and not at a time of our own choosing. That is the one experience we shall all share and is the gateway to the ultimate unity that lies beyond, but it has similarities with the unity to which we are called during this life. It is simply a letting go of all that has divided us from one another, and seeing each person around us as a brother or sister, a mother or father, a son or daughter, in ways beyond the connections of our birth and family history: it is seeing every other human being absolutely as an equal.

If this could be easily accomplished it would have been done long ago.

Why do we find it so difficult? Why does it sometimes seem that it will never be achieved?
As with so many of our questions, finding the answers involves a search within. Unity cannot exist until we have brought to an end the conflicts and unrest that dwell in our own hearts and minds.

‘Where do these wars and battles between yourselves first start?

Is it not precisely in the desires fighting inside your own selves? (James 4:1)

We have to be at peace within ourselves before we can hope to be at peace with others. At all levels, from individual right through to International, we have to ride the train which rides the tracks of unity. We can only begin to do that when we have acknowledged that the underlying call to do so is an invitation to become what we are made to be – humankind: men and women of God. And that begins one person at a time, one day at a time.
How little we comprehend what that may mean, and yet how easy to begin to find out.
If our trains of thought do not already ride on that unifying call, let us not wander away from the narrow line that runs through each of our lives, but let us linger close by while searching our mental horizons.

Stand beside the track, poised at the very edge of something to which we are all quietly drawn.
The awareness will come: the thoughts will follow; the train will arrive.

When it does, we have no need to step aboard: we are already being carried along by it.

.

The only way

Our sharing of a common destination should highlight for us the absurdity as well as the injustice and underlying evil of superficial differences that so often keep us apart. Any separation based on who or what we are, or on who we appear to be, is contrary to all that Our Lord has taught, and is in direct conflict with any proclaimed attempt to work towards unity.
As St Paul said, ‘There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female - for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ (Galatians 3:28).
It is faith in Jesus that brings us together, it is our sharing of the journey that makes us companions, and it is our mutual following of His teaching and example that draws us towards life as brothers and sisters in His name. We are His, and it is in that belonging that we can find ourselves reborn.

Our external differences are frequently experienced as being of great importance in this life. Even those which lead to so much of the aggravation and conflict in the world, and which clearly engender in so many people thoughts and feelings we know to be unacceptable at the very least, can lodge, uncomfortably or otherwise, in our own awareness. We know that all men and women are equal in the eyes of God, and we like to think the same applies when the world is viewed through our eyes. But even when we do pause to consider our attitudes towards the world at large, the result is often that we do no more than bolster our belief that this is the case, and in so doing we unknowingly bury ourselves further into our failure to recognize that, one way or another, we are all part of the problem.
This does not mean that we all have clearly defined racist, sexist, ageist, and every-other-ist attitudes, but that each of us is to some extent the product of the world around us and that world is riddled with these mindsets. The effective changing of any strongly held belief, whether collective or individual, is only achieved through a combination of faith and the passage of time. The faith begins in small ways in each one of us, with our suspicion that an attitude is wrong. The time is needed because in most adults with these wrong convictions there will be no appreciable change in their lifetimes. The strength of feeling, whether of hatred, disgust, revenge, injustice or superiority, has to be allowed to die away. The death of individuals removes their influence from their families and communities, and those who follow on, though their attitudes have been coloured by such people, will - we hope - live with a less pronounced bigotry. (For those of us who remember him, without God bringing about such a change, could we imagine Alf Garnet ever really being anyone other than who he was ?) This process, continuing through the generations, will dissipate the once intense feelings upon which inhuman attitudes were constructed, though it seems there is always somewhere in the world where differences flare into brutality, leaving us wondering if any conflict ever truly comes to an end.

This is of course a simplistic view of the problem, and similarly simplistic suggestions or proposals with regard to solutions should rightly be discarded as being naїve. However, simplistic and simple should not be dismissed as being identical twins any more than naїveté should be understood as meaning the same as some of the words found as alternatives in a thesaurus: words such as innocence, immaturity and trustfulness.
These three words are worthy of a few moments thought: they are each relevant here.
Innocence is what we do not have but should long for; immaturity is what we have but should long to be without; trustfulness is the atmosphere in which we grow into a maturity, the roots of which, though firmly embedded in a lack of innocence, draw nourishment for our re-growth. Such roots are capable of separating the good from the bad, and supplying both our present and our future with the framework for God’s work within us. This allows us to turn our backs on all that has deprived us of innocence, and any concerns we may have about being simplistic, while recognizing the simplicity of the solution as conveyed through the gift of God’s Word in Jesus. It is through continuing our process of coming together as fellow travellers with Him, following Him, and learning to see others through His eyes, that we gain an opportunity to short-circuit the far too slow passage of time in the destruction of un-Christlike and separatist attitudes.

Another word to pause with for a moment: ‘Separatist’ has been used to describe various groups of people in the past as well as the present, including those who wanted Home Rule for Ireland at a time when England still imagined that Land to be hers.
The conflict over Ireland – and we need only think of the actions and words of both Nationalists and Loyalists over Northern Ireland in the last third of the twentieth century – created much that I would have included among attitudes that could have been expected to live on until a whole generation had died away, and even then to have remained at a lower level for a further fifty years or so.
Note that I say Nationalist and Loyalist, not Catholic and Protestant. The divisions were along clearly defined lines that corresponded with the perceived differences between these two bodies of Christians, but the whole destructive struggle was a political one brought to a head by social inequalities laid over centuries of history. Religious and denominational differences became a readily available means of labelling within the media and especially within the bigoted segregation and inequality of that fractured community.
But what happened ? If we know the details we can point to any number of things, and to particular people, but still, for anyone who had any idea of the depth of feeling, the question remains: - What happened ?
‘Simplistic’ is dead and buried, but the word ‘simple’, seeming so naїve in its everyday ordinariness, points to the pre-existing simplicity and truth that is manifested through our faith and the passage of time; not our slow passage of attitudes and lives into graves with individual names, but the unnoticed approach of dawn within the hearts and minds of those who long to live, and who place their lives and loves into the hands of God. There, our innocence, maturity and trust will grow, and shall prevail.

The smallest of things can begin a minor annoyance that could eventually cause major rifts. I have purposely written naїve and naїveté above instead of naive and naivety. If any reader thinks something along the lines of, ‘What on earth has he written it that way for?’, it has perhaps demonstrated that fact.


'(Without discounting) the help of other humans in helping us draw near to God, or minimising the importance of others as God's instruments in accomplishing his work in our lives, we must ... recognise that human knowledge, wisdom or teaching, even concerning the gospel, cannot replace our need to receive revelation from God himself. It is only this direct revelation of God to our spirits that can change us and bring us new life.' (The Word Among Us. October 1992)


'The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.' (Paula D'Arcy. Where The Wind Begins.)
.

... but never alone

At first glance it is not surprising that we can be supported, encouraged to persevere, and enabled to accomplish things that would otherwise remain undone, or even un-attempted, by the mere knowledge that others are thinking and feeling in ways similar to our own experience. There is no element of surprise because we tend to have inbuilt assumptions that these people are close by, and that even if we do not really know them we know their names, and if not that we see them or hear them – at least occasionally. It is unexpected, however, to find that same sense of support and encouragement when our knowledge of such like-minded persons includes the fact that they are not only unknown, but unheard, unseen, and possibly living their lives in unknown and distant places. Such is the all-encompassing and instant reach of the internet; and such is its potential for anonymity.
It is, however, only a momentary surprise, because while it is our knowledge of the existence of these people that brings it in the first place, that same knowledge instantly dispels and banishes the surprise with its inherent comfort and feelings of shared experience. It brings something we long for, perhaps unconsciously, and it provides something we need. A satisfied longing or need invariably counters, and at the very least diminishes the feelings that preceded it, whether they be the longing itself or the immediate response to its satisfaction.
This points to fundamental differences between our physical, our emotional and our spiritual needs.

Where physical help is required, as in the provision of goods or services, we need to have people coming to us and working close to or alongside us; without this closeness, help can be neither given nor received. The victims of natural disasters, war, terrorism, ethnic and sectarian hatred, all need to have others bringing the food, water, clothing and shelter that they need. There are those who give and send but their generosity alone is not enough. Someone has to deliver what has been given: someone has to actually go to the people in need before they can realize that help is coming. In such situations there is of course a corresponding need for emotional support, and this can come through those who have brought the physical help.

When our need is solely for emotional support, in situations other than where much of that need stems from physical desperation or deprivation – through having no food or water for our children, for example – we do not have that same urgency of need for the physical presence of people; we may desire it, and we will always benefit more from having it than not, but, it is not absolutely essential. We need to talk to people, the right people, and if they are unable to be with us we are still able to benefit from their listening and their reassuring input via the telephone, especially in this age of mobiles, and through email, the ability to chat via our computers, video links and so on, and for those who are not part of this technological advance, the telephone land line is still as straightforward as it was, and letter writing remains as an effective and personal way of making thoughts and feelings known.

Clearly our spiritual needs will frequently overlap with our emotional ones, as do these, in turn, with our physical circumstances, but the need for the physical presence of others is related to our worldly weakness and our natural tendencies, not to our supernatural confusion and our spiritual doubts or emptiness. Unless we know who to talk to and who will be able to guide us, we have no more chance of finding what we need with a person known to us than with a complete stranger. That does not mean we can walk down the road sticking our thumb out and hoping someone will stop and take us to our destination. They will be going where they are going, and they have come from wherever they have been. They don’t know where you are on your journey; they don’t know where you have been, and they don’t know where you are going. They certainly don’t know where you are meant to be going.

It is the stranger who makes known aspects of his or her spiritual life that resonate with our own, who is no longer a stranger to us. Simply knowing of the existence of that person with their inner life so similar to our own, lays a foundation for our security in what had been only loneliness and doubt. To expand this awareness until we not only suspect, but believe in and sense the presence of many such people in the world around us, is to realize that we are not alone in our search. Though remaining for the most part unseen and unknown, the knowledge of their existence assures us that we are in good company. It is from the relative stability of this low-key sense of union of purpose and direction, that we are enabled to calm ourselves sufficiently in faith, in trust and in prayer, to sense the reality of our only real and ever-present companion.
He is the only real teacher and guide, who, though seeming to be a fellow traveller walking with us every step of the way, is in fact the one we strive to follow. We find ourselves in a place of safety, and it is in this gentle embrace that we hear His words; we come to know that He is speaking, not only to others, but to us.

‘And look, I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.’ (Matthew 28:20)

.

Walking alone ...

Whoever we are, if we live without being able to share thoughts and feelings with at least one other person, we are living alone.
To allow someone else to get to know us, to understand what matters to us, what makes us joyful and sad, angry or embarrassed, what our strengths and weaknesses are, our hopes and fears, our ambitions, failures and regrets; this is to have a real friend.
Some people seem able to share most of these things with almost everyone they get to know, but part of that apparent ease of opening up may be their own building of a protective wall which, while appearing to do the opposite, successfully keeps something hidden from others: something unspoken and unsuspected. Such people are surrounded by friends but may still lack a real and complete friendship.
If we do have just one person in our lives with whom we share everything, it may be a husband or wife, or a ‘partner’ of similar importance or standing in our lives; it may be a parent or sibling, a close friend, or even someone we have come to trust through a professional relationship: a doctor, a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Whoever it may be, we benefit from their presence in our lives and from our ability to share ourselves with them.

Often, however, when we are conscious of our lives being overlaid by something beyond the world’s reasoning, and when we find ourselves on some form of spiritual journey, we do not know quite how to tell someone else about it. The person or persons with whom we thought we could share almost anything are proved to be just that; we can share almost everything, but this is somehow different. How do we even bring up the subject ? We have never mentioned this sort of thing before, so how do we know that they will even understand what we are talking about? – especially as we scarcely know how to explain what we are thinking and feeling.
And might it even be something that will come between us and result in a weakening or even the loss of a valued friendship?
Perhaps we regard the risk as too great, and, being troubled by the inner conflict, we remain silent.
The relationship, while being outwardly unchanged, is suddenly not enough: it is recognized as being incomplete.

Even in friendships with people who are known to foster the spiritual dimension or their lives, the surface is easy enough to talk about: we can examine it together, polish it, bounce ideas off it, and enjoy the interaction as well as the benefits it brings, but wherever we are on our journey, and however great or small the number of persons with whom we meet and communicate, without a sharing of the reality of the yearning buried deep in our hearts, we travel alone.

'There is talk which can be a great spiritual help to us - I mean the earnest exchange of ideas about spiritual things;

especially when two souls, well matched in temper and disposition, find themselves drawn together in God.'

(The Imitation of Christ. Thomas a Kempis.)

Being a member of a community provides support and companionship, but of itself does little more, and without the freedom to share our spiritual needs and truths, being a member of a church or a congregation alone is meaningless.
The difficulty encountered in trying to do this accounts for the fact that for many of us it is the attentive stranger who offers the best means of opening up in this way. A priest or pastor who does not know us, a stranger who in some way just registers with us as the right person at that moment – a recognition of God’s provision perhaps? Or, again, a professional consultant of some sort.
M. Scott Peck, himself a psychiatrist, wrote in the Afterword to his book, “In the time since its initial publication, I have been fortunate enough to receive many letters from readers of ‘The Road Less Travelled’. They have been extraordinary letters. … (they) have enriched my life. It has become clear to me that there is a whole network - far more vast than I had dared to believe – of people across the country who have quietly been proceeding for long distances along the less travelled road of spiritual growth. They have thanked me for diminishing their sense of aloneness on the journey. I thank them for the same service.’
That sense of aloneness is unavoidable: it is part of the reality of the journey, but becoming aware that we are not in fact alone enables us to find peace and even joy in our experience of being alone.

This returns me to my very first words written on the web: the opening words of this soliloquy. I repeat them here: -

'Wherever this may lead, I hope it will lead both of us there: not just you, and not just me. We may sojourn here awhile together, but it is in the nature of the very edge that we shall each travel our separate ways towards, or away from our goals. That we share a common destination is the only realization we can truly share, though our meeting, acknowledgement, and passing by, cannot help but feed us and bring that much needed hint of confirmation: - that quiet "Amen" to the sometimes doubted validity of our journey.

Inevitably we shall find ourselves alone at the very edge, but an awareness of other solitary minds close by, each with its own struggle, its own yearning, and its own longing for peace and truth, may enable us to remain close to the edge through every emotion, and in whatever situation or circumstance this day, or tomorrow, may bring.’

Scott Peck acknowledged his own reassurance derived from receiving those letters, while recognizing that the letters had been written because he had provided a similar comfort for others through his written words. Knowing that someone else is there counters all debilitating aspects of isolation.
Similarly, I am encouraged by the knowledge that someone somewhere is reading what I write. I can only assume that whoever spends time reading these words is gaining a form of support or strength from some of what they find; (why else would you spend time here?) However limited that help may be, the result is that we are aware of each other’s existence in a form of spiritual friendship that aids us in our daily toil along the ‘less travelled road’. We are journeying together as members of a loosely knit band of followers, unseen and unknown to one another, but spiritually inseparable.

.

The unshared secret

In a previous post (15.6.07 ‘Estrangement’) I quoted a passage from one of Cardinal Newman’s sermons. I have always found it memorable and have always been conscious of the truth it conveys, but it has recently returned to me as though of more immediate significance in my present heightened need for an answer to the question, ‘What is it that I should be doing?’

That question can and does take many forms. As written, it is a broad-sounding query without any apparent importance or urgency. It could suggest an awareness that I should be doing some other particular thing rather than that in which I am actually engaged, or that I should be doing something, or even anything, rather than idling my time away doing nothing, but it is a great deal more than that. It is important, and though unable to know whether or not it is in fact urgent, it is accompanied by a sense of urgency born of that lack of knowledge. What if it is urgent? What if I really should be doing some particular thing right now? - Something I am urgently required to be doing, but of which I have as yet no clear idea?
Instead of being a broad suggestion of what could be absentmindedness, indifference or neglect, ‘What is it that I should be doing?’ is etched unavoidably into the surface of my consciousness by the relentless gnawing of my conscience. Whatever the words uttered or heard within, they are felt as a repeated rousing of something vitally important; What am I being asked to do? What am I called to do? What do I need to do? What is my purpose? What is it that I need to accomplish if I am to bear the fruit for which I was created? I may think I know who I am, but who is the real me? Who is it that I am called to be? -That I was made to be? And how near or far am I from being that person?
In that same post I also wrote, ‘Even among our friends we are fundamentally separate ... through our lack of understanding of our place in the world.’ In other words, through not knowing the answer to those same questions.

Reading the Newman passage as though speaking to myself, those parts which seem almost to be a personal reproach combine to read as follows:
‘Perhaps the reason why my attainments are so poor is that I dare not trust others with the secret of my heart, and I fear that, as a cause of estrangement, which really would be a bond of union. I make clean the outside of things; I am amiable and friendly to others in words and deeds, but my love is not enlarged. The presence of Christ is not in it.’
The passage has always made me uncomfortably aware that, other than in a superficial way, I do not share my thoughts and feelings with anyone else, but having personalised it in that way I find further weight being added to a leaning that has already become apparent to me. Though the answer is not appreciably nearer, the direction I should take to find guidance in my search for that answer is perhaps being made more clear.

We all have that same need to become the person we are made to be, and however far we have journeyed, and however vague or intense the questioning may be, there is a corresponding need to be alert, to be awake, to be on the lookout for the help that will always come our way. It is a matter of recognizing God’s provision for us.
This is something of which I thought I was already well aware, and yet, as soon as I found myself deeply embedded in something of importance which has me yearning for clarification, guidance, and a sure sense of direction, all such awareness seems to have drifted away. I have buried myself in a busyness that has apparently prevented me from using abilities I already have: the ability to see and to hear and to feel, in other words, the ability to recognize the availability of guidance in places to which I already have access. God has provided all that I need, but through the narrow-mindedness of my own searching I have walked straight past the doors that are already open to me. Introspection has blinded me, and self-consciousness has distanced me from those who may effortlessly steer me in the right direction. I had been given a key but had failed to see what it could unlock, and I had found the door without knowing that I had the means to walk straight through it.
I have recently written about being free in the hands of God, and have now experienced how easy it is to lose all sense of that freedom as a result of our own striving after that very thing. I already had the freedom, but it slipped away unnoticed as I tried hard to grasp something that could not be grasped. With the return of relaxation and trust, the freedom becomes apparent once more, and with it comes the clarity to see what was already there. It is easy to believe that we have faith, but without a perpetual and living awareness of its life within us the reality will be intermittent at best.

The experience of friendship is warm and it is safe, but the potential within it goes far beyond our normal expectations. Combined with a deeply shared faith it has almost frightening possibilities, and that is why we usually keep ourselves apart at the deepest levels. ‘The presence of Christ is not in it,’ said Newman, and yet we know Christ’s words well enough: ‘For where two or three meet in my name, I am there among them.’ (Matthew 18:20)
Therein lies another aspect of my failure and my fault; I have failed to find a sense of direction towards the answer I seek, not only through the blindness resulting from my self-centred search, but through trying to find the answer for myself: through stubbornly going it alone. The answer will come from Christ Himself through the guidance of The Holy Spirit. He has said that He is ‘where two or three meet’ in His name, not to suggest that He is not with the solitary, but to convey the power and the wonder that is manifested more fully when people truly bring themselves together in His presence. Just as The Holy Spirit can be thought of as being the communication and the love between The Father and The Son, so, in each of us bringing Jesus to our meeting with each other, we enable Christ in me to communicate with Christ in you and vice versa. The Spirit speaks to us and within us, and we are in the midst of the shared secret of our hearts; all we have to do is share that secret fully with each other. Then will our love be enlarged.

That is true freedom in the hands of God; and Christ is in it.
It becomes increasingly clear that I have yet to yield myself fully to this freedom in which progress lies hidden. It is only in having been confined by my own questioning that I have seen how incomplete my freedom was, and only in having regained some measure of it that I realize I had been drawn away from my place of peace and solitude: away from the edge at which I am most likely to be in tune with that which feeds me and breathes within me.
It is in God’s hands that all answers lie, and it is where I slip effortlessly out of the noisy activity of the world that I am most aware of being held within them. My guidance will be unlocked through the sharing of my heart’s secret, and my answers will be found while watching and waiting at the very edge. I must return to the path that takes me there.

‘... let the renewing of your minds transform you, so that you may discern for yourselves what is the will of God ...’

(Romans 12:2)

Another tree

The freedom we must not merely allow, but must actively encourage in all who follow after us as well as in our own children, is the same freedom in which we are now able to live our own lives. It is a freedom to become, to be and to live as ourselves: as the people we were born to be. The world effortlessly drowns our recognition of it, and little wonder perhaps, as even for those whose lives are a continual quest for understanding, for meaning and for truth, it does not appear to be any form of freedom until they are already living within it.
Every aspect of a journey of faith is a further step on the journey into an even deeper faith, and every such step transforms us: we are brought to a place we could not have imagined before arriving there, and the shift in our awareness, hope and trust – however small the move may be – could not have been anticipated. It is granted through an openness to the unlimited possibility of God’s presence and His awareness of us as individuals. With every small step we take towards Him, He reveals all that we need to draw us ever deeper towards our goal: freedom in His hands with a longing for nothing but to do His will.

Viewed from without, faith brings restriction and self-denial, endless struggle with temptation, inevitable failure and consequent feelings of guilt: a mental and emotional incarceration without the merest hint of freedom. And yet, though unrecognizable, this is the freedom for which we long. It is what seems to be another paradox, but when that freedom is attained even in the smallest measure, the contradiction dissolves into an appreciation of the impossibility of comprehension without our own experience.
The whole process of journeying into the arms of God can appear to be one of walking blindfolded on a narrow and difficult path, and in allowing ourselves to be guided along the way, of being led by others who are equally blind. This is one of the sad products of our living and growing in the world with no conscious trace of that ‘first light’ with which we had been born. Instead of growing both naturally and supernaturally into and through the stages of realization, we have to battle our way back to the beginnings of that essential awareness, and then, building on a hesitant faith in an unknown Presence, we find ourselves among The Found, we hear ourselves being called by name and we feel His touch; He grasps us and steadily draws us toward Himself; we know we have been claimed as His own, and we begin to feel the impregnable safety that is His embrace. All this leads to the fulfilment of our worldly life: we are fully transformed into the men and women He made us to be. We truly become ourselves, and we are able to put every facet of our being and our longing into the words, ‘Do with me what You will Lord.’

Mark 4:28 speaks of the growth that occurs in the transformation of a seed while unattended in the ground. This is how our spiritual growth should have been, but the reality is that we have to strip away all the veils and curtains that separate us from that growth before we can begin the process of recovery.
My garden once again provides me with physical reminders of the extra labour and support needed to achieve what nature would herself have accomplished without effort if growth had been allowed to continue undisturbed from seed to maturity.
The established root system of any plant is the source of life and the stability that enables it to take its place in the world, standing strong and fulfilling its purpose. This is particularly evident to us in the life and the strength of a tree.

Nearly every tree visible from my home, including those in my own garden, has grown where nature placed it,. They have simply done what they do, and they have done it well. But I have two Ash trees that were found growing from seed in the lawn, and having managed to see them and avoid them with the mower throughout what I took to be their first two years of growth, I eased them out of the ground and heeled them in again where they could be left in peace. That was more than twenty five years ago, and today they are real tree sized trees.
In their case the potentially disastrous upheaval had no lasting ill effects and their continued growth required no more than being placed back into their natural environment.

So it is with our spiritual awareness; early in life the potential is all there and feeding on what it is given, and seemingly drastic setbacks can be countered and overcome in the right environment and atmosphere. The childhood awareness of the light within is not easily quenched other than by the wrong example of those from whom a child takes its lead, and by the distractions of the man-made world into which we bring them.
As adults however, getting back to a position of safety, stability and fruitful growth into a meaningful maturity is far more difficult.
Whether moving towards faith for the first time, or trying to rebuild it after gradually falling away, or after some major event that has shaken all belief to the very roots, simply trying to connect to the support and nourishment we need, and hoping that this will ‘heel us in’ to the right environment will not suffice. It takes hard work, commitment and perseverance, advice and moral support from the right people, and a very real and rock solid means of steadying us through whatever may come; and that may be needed for a long time.
This does not deny the possibility of being suddenly brought to life and faith; this is an ever-present possibility for all of us and we should be praying for the Spirit of God to fill us in that way, but it does not bring everything at once, all the answers and all the understanding, all the trust and all the peace, and it does bring a need for a supportive and ongoing nourishment of a different kind.

Unlike the two Ash trees transplanted when in their infancy, I have recently planted another tree that portrays the more drastic needs of the mature when trying to establish or re-establish themselves in the ground of faith. It is a larger than usual tree for transplanting and needed a sizeable hole to receive it, preparation of the soil around it, the laying of perforated pipe around the roots to ensure that watering will get down to the right places, and three large stakes to hold it securely in place by means of strong strapping. Its support has already been severely tested by the recent strong winds and without it the root system would never be able to successfully grow and spread into the surrounding ground; the tree would have no chance of becoming firmly anchored in it’s maturity, and could not be expected to become the tree it was made to be. The stakes will remain in place for at least the next three years. When they are removed it will no longer need that support, just as it will no longer need watering and feeding by anything other than nature herself.
Growth and transformation will continue unseen, and I shall have made way for its freedom in the hands of God.

‘And when the crop is ready, at once he starts to reap because the harvest has come.’
(Mark 4:29)

... 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.
.

Emmanuel

Emmanuel

The silent anonymity of conception
Self-abnegates, as life utters
Into harmony with flesh and bone:
Grown onto rootstock of creation's own
Irrepressible fountain of possibility.

Diversity pulsates to the beat
Of the eternal drum,
cascading truth and certainty.

God's dream becomes the waking womb;
"I am" is echoed in all things,
And, in the silence,
Being sings its throbbing song
And trembles into life.

© Paul Amphlett 2002