Use and abuse

‘... it is to such as these that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs.’ (Matthew 19:14)

The documentary, ‘Jesus Camp’, was shown again a few weeks ago on British television. In it, Becky Fischer, a Pentecostal children’s minister who runs an annual summer camp for Evangelical children - or rather, for the children of Evangelical parents - says that “boys and girls can change the world”, and that “they are so open: they are so usable in Christianity”.
This is undoubtedly true, but the word ‘usable’ immediately suggests a dangerous road. Childhood is inherently vulnerable, but if children are seen as ‘usable’ their vulnerability is instantly increased. The thought itself is the beginning of abuse.

Children are not for ‘using’ in anything or for anything, except by God. It is He alone who may use their innocence and simplicity in the furtherance of His cause. Any person, parent included, who uses a child for their own ends, or even for ends they believe to be in accordance with God’s will for the child, for the community or for the wider Church, abuses the child. No form of physical or sexual abuse excludes emotional and psychological abuse, but even where there is no physical aspect to the ‘use’ of a child, the very fact that a child is being ‘used’ by someone is a complete abuse of childhood and of the underlying trust, wonder and beauty upon which it should be based. If God chooses to use a child for some purpose it is the unadulterated innocence, simplicity and truth of childhood that He uses. If we use a child, we tamper with and damage both the childhood and the child.

Becky Fischer goes on to say, ‘Our enemies are putting their efforts and their focus on the kids; they’re going into the schools. You go into Palestine, and I can take you to some websites that will absolutely shake you to your foundations, and show you photographs of where they’re taking their kids to camps like we take our kids to Bible Camps, and they’re putting hand-grenades in their hands, they’re teaching them how to put on bomb-belts, they’re teaching them how to use rifles, they’re teaching them how to use machine-guns. It’s no wonder, that with that kind of intense training and discipling, that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam. I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are over in Pakistan, in Israel and Palestine: all those different places, - because ... we have the truth.’

This is nothing if not deeply worrying, and it all appears to stem from a misinterpretation of some of the world’s ongoing conflicts: a failure to separate extreme indoctrination (the perceived reality) from the reality of Islam, and a failure to recognize the only real enemy we all have.
An equally extreme way of pressurizing children, but without the physical weaponry, is not what Christ’s Church is about. It is not what Jesus would do: It is not what any of His followers are called to do: It is not Christian. His words were, ‘Suffer little children’ not ‘make little children suffer’; and suffer they do. Jesus, whose incarnation was for one definitive purpose, had His childhood and His youth without undue or abusive pressures. Those who were closely involved with His journey to maturity allowed God’s grace to work in Him, waiting and trusting, never making their own decisions about His calling and usefulness. Jesus had thirty years before starting His ministry: thirty years of meditation, contemplation, revelation: thirty years of learning and of self-realization. It was the learning, not the teaching of others, which brought Him to the point where God, His Father, could direct Him through His Mission.

The normalization of the abnormal continues its insidious spread through society, and as we gradually and unconsciously become more accustomed to its apparent acceptability, we place our judgement, our conscience, our capacity for indignation and righteous anger, at the very edge of our day-to-day awareness of the world around us. Aspects of God’s Kingdom are being undermined and fragmented all around us, and we utter not one word.

‘... rather than the living who still have lives to live,
I congratulate the dead who have already met death;
happier than both of these are those who are yet unborn
and have not seen the evil things that are done under the sun.’
(Ecclesiastes 4:2,3)

Imperfection

An awareness of Saints’ ordinary human beginnings makes them attractive to people in simple human situations, especially those whose lives are lived in a continuous and unchanging world of subsistence or poverty, with little evidence to demonstrate that anyone outside their own communities or cultures gives them more than a passing thought, even less that anybody cares.

The attractiveness of shared experience brings people together and into communion with each other, and in a similar way, this natural gathering process brings them into communion with those who have gone before. A confraternity of present and past Christians is formed and this is the present and ongoing reality for us of the Communion of Saints.
Within this Communion we find ‘examples of holiness’ among the people with whom we associate; we are ‘awakened’ and ‘nourished’ by them as part of God’s gift to us through community, and, as stated in The Catechism, those same expressions of His love are clearly available to us through the exceptional examples of the Saints. They may have had no further need of purification when they died: they may have entered God’s presence in that moment, but perfection will have been bestowed during the transition rather than achieved while they still lived.

St John of The Cross is prominent among those who have provided guidance for people who long to approach God through a life of contemplative prayer. His writings deal with the attainment of union with God, and it is this that, through being frequently described as ‘perfection’, causes the confusion; it is a matter of degree and of context. It is the ultimate point of perfection in the human capacity for prayer, but not perfection itself. Only Jesus was perfect.
In his ‘Instructions and Precautions ...’ to those seeking to arrive at perfection, he wrote, ‘If any religious desires to attain in a short time to holy recollection, spiritual silence, detachment and poverty of spirit - where the peaceful rest of the spirit is enjoyed, and union with God attained ... he must strictly practise the following instructions. ... If he will do this ... he will advance rapidly to great perfection, acquire all virtue and attain unto holy peace.’
His use of the word ‘great’ does not add to the emphasis of perfection, but lessens it in keeping with his own awareness that he speaks of something - however lofty in this life – that is below the presently unattainable unity and perfection to which this life leads.
I have read that when St John was made a Doctor of the Church, the then Pope stated that his work should be regarded as a guide for anyone striving to live ‘a more perfect life’. ‘More perfect’ again points to coming close to the very best that we can do: not perfection, but a life as near to it as can be achieved; a perfect life, by its very nature must fall short of true perfection.

In her book ‘Ecstasy’, Marghanita Laski made comparisons of the times taken to attain the unitive state, the perfection of human prayer: - ‘St. Paul and St. Catherine of Siena each took three years, Suso sixteen years, St. Teresa thirty years, while that flaming thing which was the soul of Jesus burned its way to full expression in forty days of solitary communion.’
For me this is meaningless. From the moment of His conception, though Jesus was a man, He was something no other human being could ever be. He was the perfection of humanity: He ‘... is not incapable of feeling our weaknesses with us, but has been put to the test in exactly the same way as ourselves, apart from sin.’ (Hebrews 4:15)
All others were and are sinners. ‘If we say, “We have no sin,” we are deceiving ourselves, and truth has no place in us.’ (1 John 1:8).
We have a maximum capacity for perfection somewhere below where Jesus was before He ever set foot in the desert.

This is why we should lay all else aside to follow Him. His disciples may look to the Saints and to Mary, His Mother, but they are examples of what can be achieved not the focus of the journey, and they constantly draw onwards, not towards themselves, but to a closer following of Christ. It is this alone that makes us Christians just as they were Christians through their own faith and following.
Mary’s instruction to the servants at the wedding feast at Cana, sums up her unending transference of all focus and devotion in the direction of her son. All who look to her must not linger, but must journey on in the direction she so clearly defines.

‘Do whatever he tells you.’

(John 2:5)

Something close

It is the very ordinariness of the man or woman that makes the process of sanctification such a blessing. If humankind ever had another easier, even automatic way of achieving perfection, a way inherent in our very existence, it was lost to us at the very beginning, as the story of the Garden of Eden portrays.
It is their ordinary beginning that brings the saints into a meaningful relationship with the average Christian of today; it brings them into our everyday sphere of consciousness as people who lived lives in much the same way as we ourselves live, with struggle, hesitation and doubt. That which made them recognizable as Saints was drawn out of their living lives of faith amid distraction, temptation and the needs of others.
I do not mean to equate sanctification with perfection, though the completion of the process will inevitably take us there. But, within the bounds of this life, we can have no way of fully knowing what it is or of recognizing it, other than in the presence of Jesus Himself. Perfection can be a distinctly unhelpful word to us as we strive to be one of His disciples, following to the best of our ability, picking ourselves up repeatedly when we fall, and walking on in the unflinching knowledge that Jesus has done the complete and irreversible work of redemption for us; there is nothing required of us other than a constant turning towards obedience to His teaching and His will, and learning to see every person, every need and every situation through His eyes.

The persons we call Saints are those regarded as having lived beyond the normal limits of human life, with an achieved level of sanctification surpassing the expectation of those deemed best able to judge such things. But, just as true peace and truth are beyond our normal understanding of those words, so nothing is perfect until true perfection is attained. Whatever their assessed degree of sanctification, and however far they may have progressed, those we regard as Saints are unlikely to have achieved perfection in this life. But we revere them as though they had, and therein lies part of the reason for the wrong understanding of our devotion.
Those outside the Catholic Church believe those within it pervert the means of access to spiritual nourishment by praying to Saints instead of to Christ Himself. This is highlighted by the Catholic’s perceived relationship with the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.

It is as easy for Catholics to blame those outside their church for any failure to understand correctly, as it is for members of protestant and reformed churches (the same but with different emphases on reasons for being separated) to blame the Catholic Church and its individual members for what they see as a form of idolatry. And who are the people most to blame for much of the confusion?

The ordinary, devout but spiritually dilute Catholics who find an ordinariness, a simplicity, a poverty, an injustice or a persecution, in the Saints’ stories that closely parallels their own. But these understandable links of lifestyle and hardship are perverted by the elevation of the Saints to positions of prominence and adoration.
Their real power in our lives is in their having had their feet in the same mud and dust that we now tread, in their ordinary human origins, and in their successful journeying to become the persons God made them to be. It is not in statues, candles, or sanitized and beautified versions seen forever as beyond our world and our reach. They did not feel perfect and beautiful during their lifetime.

In her ‘Guidelines for Mystical Prayer’, Ruth Burrows has written, -
‘Our cowardice and our pride are past-masters at disposing of the saints. We don’t burn them: we put them on a pedestal, which is the same thing as putting them on the shelf. They do not challenge us any more. They are no longer men and women just like ourselves, flesh, blood, nerves; somehow they are quite special, they have been given what we have not. They did not really spring from our common stock. This flower of holiness is not of our soil. Those far above us do not challenge us, it is the one close to us who does what we do not do, becomes what we do not become, this is whom we fear, this is the one we must dispose of. What is more, we find vicarious satisfaction in seeing one of ourselves raised to a superhuman state. We like to think that this is what human nature really is.’

The line between valid appreciation and idolatrous promotion can be very narrow, and even low levels of Christian awareness and devotion make is easy to cross that line unawares. That tendency has been with mankind for a very long time.

‘The people of the Old Testament were tempted to make idols of wood, ivory or silver to hang from their camels’ saddles, while the people of the New Testament carry saints’ medals in their pockets instead of God in their hearts. The motive is more or less the same. We are too idle to make the effort to think of God as being beyond time and space, in His Transcendence and Mystery – it is so much more convenient to give Him a cheap face in order to replace His remoteness with something tangible, something close to us, something above all which will heal us when we are ill, enrich us when we are poor.’ (Love is for Living. Carlo Carretto)

- And this in spite of the fact that God Himself did ‘replace His remoteness with something tangible, something close to us ...’

He gave us Jesus.

Moments

The potential influence of particular moments on our understanding of ourselves, and of our journey is immense. That potential is roused from the apparently blank canvas of our lives when we first begin to notice these moments and give space to thoughts that they may have meaning for us. The potential is realized when their significance is no longer doubted, and when we begin to look for such moments in everything we do. They are - if we open ourselves to the possibility - one of the ways in which the Holy Spirit leads us towards the complete truth. We begin to live in the power of the Spirit when we are alert to such guidance and when we become capable of an appropriate and unhesitating response.

Such moments are scattered through our whole lives, and our childhood was almost certainly filled with them as part of the ‘first light’ which we had not yet totally lost amid the world’s distractions. The overall memory of wonder and innocence is, in part, the long-lived echo of those days of closer communication with God. Some childhood moments are clearly remembered as having significance; one such is quoted by Michael Paffard in his book, The Unattended Moment. Mary Antin, an American immigrant writing of her experiences as a tiny child in Poland wrote, “In the long black furrows yet unsown a peasant pushed his plough. I watched him go up and down, leaving a new black line on the bank for every turn. Suddenly he began to sing, a rude ploughman’s song. Only the melody reached me, but the meaning sprang up in my heart to fit it – a song of the earth and the hopes of the earth. I sat a long time listening, looking, tense with attention. I felt myself discovering things. Something in me gasped for life, and lay still. I was but a little body, and Life Universal had suddenly burst upon me. For a moment I had my little hand on the Great Pulse, but my fingers slipped, empty. For the space of a wild heartbeat I knew, and then I was again a simple child, looking to my earthly senses for life. But the sky had stretched for me, the earth had expanded; a greater life had dawned in me. We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later …”

The background influence present to me during my formative years did not become more than a peaceful presence, though its effect on my life, and on my whole way of thinking and of seeing the world, has probably been far greater than my awareness would suggest. Of the people whose great names have been carved into the monastic and mendicant orders they founded, however, it was not Benedict that became most firmly lodged in my childhood and in my slowly maturing mind.
It was the image of the man with birds on his hands and arms that sat most beautifully in my innocence. Sunshine, trees, flowers, birds and bees, timid animals rarely and fleetingly seen: did we not all long to be at one with everything around us in the way portrayed in that image? St Francis of Assisi was entwined with my childhood in ways that Benedict and other saints were not.
But one thing common to them all was that I actually knew very little about any of them, and that was how it remained for years. When I did open a book on one of them for the first time in my adult life, I was already a changed man. Something momentous had happened to me and faith had burst into the reality of my life; I was no longer a Christian in name only. The process of transformation into the person God wills me to be has slowly continued, but the impact of the early part of the journey was immense. When one’s accustomed state (with hindsight) is one of apparent immobility, any sudden forward movement is unnerving and breathtaking: it destroys all certainty and feelings of stability in the same way that even a small earth-tremor can strip away every thread of a person’s confidence in their strength and physical significance. In both cases - the one physical, the other mental, emotional and spiritual - the undoubted security of standing upon solid ground is pulled from under one’s feet.

I had developed an insatiable appetite for reading spiritual and religious books as well as the Bible, and when I did choose one on the life of a particular person it was not surprising that it should be St Francis, though the unsuspected force with which that choice would speak to me has left me wondering whether I was guided that day to that particular book, on that shelf, in that second-hand bookshop.
Cardinal Newman wrote of his own experience, “Who can account for the impressions which are made on him? For a mere sentence, the words of St Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. … After a while, I got calm, and at length the vivid impression upon my imagination faded away.” (John Henry Newman. Apologia Pro Vita Sua)
The lasting impression for me has not been the reading of the book, (‘Saint Francis of Assisi’ by Elizabeth Goudge) and it is neither a particular chapter or passage within it, nor any detail of his life story; it is opening the cover for the first time and reading the four simple words printed on an otherwise empty page.

Part One

Francesco Bernadone

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I was immediately grasped by something touching me so deeply that I could not move on from that page. I believe it was the first time that truth, the deeper absolute truth, had really registered within me in all its power and utter simplicity. ‘Veritas’, with its Dominican black and white, confronting me in the stark form of ink on otherwise blank paper. No shades of grey, no room for discussion or argument, no compromise, no doubt. Just a brief statement of fact: an absolute truth of such simplicity but of awesome significance to me in that moment; a moment that lasted a long time. I was held captive by those words, and once I could see them again after the cascades of emotion welling up from within had receded, my eyes and mind flitted from one line to the other and back again, ... Part One ... Francesco Bernadone ... Part One ... while tears continued dropping onto the page. I had encountered something that demanded my attention, and the fullness of the demand was more than I could unravel; it was also something that would not release me from its hold, and of which I could not let go. I remained with that page for several minutes, until finally, knowing I could go no further, I closed the book. I stayed with my intensely focussed thoughts for a while longer before leaving it where it lay, and strolling in the garden with this young man Francesco, of whom I had not heard before. The birds seemed more numerous and their singing was nothing if not a song of praise.

I had opened the book to read about St Francis and had been shown an ordinary man.

I had been shown that St Francis could not have existed without that apparently ordinary man, that the end of a story is meaningless without the intricacies of the middle years, and, most importantly, there is no story to be told, there is no St Francis without the beginning. That beginning, that Part One, was the young man who had yet to think a single thought of his journey into life as Francis of Assisi: as the person he was meant to be.

The start of the life, the journey and the story was Francesco Bernadone; that same Francesco was the start of all we now know.

Whoever we are, and whatever we may have done or failed to do, we have the potential to become as God would have us be.

‘Meanwhile, let us go forward from the point we have each attained.’
(Philippians 3:16)

Deep within

“Peace I bequeath to you,
my own peace I give you,
a peace which the world cannot give, this is my gift to you.”
(John 14:27)

Above all else, it is peace that I consciously value. Anything damaging it, disturbing it, or distracting me from it, attempts far more than merely interrupting a peaceful existence: it tears at something deep within me, for that is where peace lies.
An external hush and the absence of conflict, so often mistaken for real peace, are clearly gentle, quiet, and calming: they contribute to unstressed living and a peaceful world, but that in itself is only a good start-point for finding the depths of true peace. It cannot be found in anything the world has to offer because it is not of this world: it is ‘a peace which the world cannot give’.

The Benedictine monks and nuns who have been on the fringes of my life for as long as I can remember, have ‘Pax’, peace, as their motto, and this has become increasingly meaningful to me with the passage of time. We are all particularly susceptible to the influence of whatever has been present during our formative years, and my own increasing awareness of this has revealed that I have been privileged to have such a long-term presence acting as a background guide throughout my life; but I have also become aware that I have had privileged access to only one facet of the truth.
What brought this home to me more than anything else was my first brief but real contact with another order, the Order of Preachers – The Dominicans. Their most frequently quoted motto is ‘Veritas’, Truth, and it was the impact of that word that first made me fully aware of my frighteningly narrow understanding of my faith, my sense of direction, my fellow Christians, and of what Jesus had done for me in living and dying as a man upon this earth. Everything that drags me down, tempts me and halts my hesitant progress towards real fulfilment was experienced and understood by Jesus himself; He has experienced everything that rises and falls, that surges and breaks in pieces in my life: He knows everything of the ebb and flow that goes on within me. This is all part of my own truth, and nobody can really know me without knowing everything about me, good and bad. Jesus does know me, through and through.

The peace that shadowed my childhood at Stanbrook, and formed a hushed background to my teenage years at Douai, drew me further into a quiet contentment with my own company. I began to withdraw too far from the people around me and from the supportive and edifying presence of my fellow Christians, until that word, ‘Veritas’, suddenly thinned my easy comfort by loudly proclaiming that my peace was nothing if not built upon truth. And (as with peace) the truth as the world normally understands it, even when ‘whole’ and ‘nothing but’, is only an outer cover of honesty that enables us to recognize and enter into the deeper reality and significance of truth.

“... when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth, ...”
(John 16:13)

Both the peace of Christ and the truth of the Holy Spirit must make their home deep within us.
In chapters 13 to 17 of John’s gospel, during the Last Supper, Jesus presents us with a trinity of feeling, of experience, and of expression that parallels The Holy Trinity itself. He commands the apostles, and us, to love one another and pass on the Father’s love to each other just as He has personified it and passed it on to us. “I have loved you just as the Father has loved me.”(15:9)
With the peace of the Son and the truth of the Spirit combining within us and manifesting themselves as the love of the Father towards each one of us, we can become living expressions of the unity which is God Himself. How else shall the Christian Church be returned to the loving harmony for which Jesus created it, and to the clear expression of that togetherness which will lead the world to regard Christianity as synonymous with unity ?

Just as the peaceful example of the Benedictines in my life has played its part in leading me close to Christ, so the deep-rooted truth behind the vocation of the Dominicans will have done the same for those with longer associations with them.
Though written with reference to preachers, the following speaks well of the transforming effect we can all have on others if we allow God to take possession of our innermost being. We will never abandon ourselves to His will if we always linger at the very edge, clinging to some part of ourselves that we believe to be essential to our knowledge of who we are. We must place our whole being in His hands if we are to find the reality of our calling.

‘We religious ... in our corporeality, can make Christ present in our way. The preacher brings the Word to expression, not just in his or her words, but in all that we are. God’s compassion seeks to become flesh and blood in us, in our tenderness, even in our faces.
In the Old Testament, we often find the prayer that God’s face may shine upon us. This prayer was finally answered in the form of a human face, Christ’s face. He looks at the rich young man, loves him and asks him to follow him; he looks at Peter in the courtyard after his betrayal; he looks at Mary Magdalene in the garden and calls her by her name. As preachers, flesh and blood, we can give body to that compassionate look of God. Our bodiliness is not excluded from our vocation.’ (Sing a New Song. Timothy Radcliffe OP)

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Rising above

The wide open spaces of truth can only be opened up for us when their existence has been revealed to our previously blank and unseeing gaze. The veil which had so effectively obscured them from our hearts and minds, and thus from our sight, is gently wafted aside by the breath of the Holy Spirit as part of an ongoing process of spiritual awakening. Our increasing awareness draws towards and beyond the obscuring curtain of unbelief that so effectively excludes us from the vastness of possibility lying beyond our mundane routines, repetitious desires, and imagined certainties. Drawn into a world of wonder, new horizons invite us to linger, and to journey into the ever brightening light. We are led into opening up these spaces for ourselves: into seeking and searching, and into a deeper unravelling of our vague recognition and experience in the presence of something we cannot fully comprehend but which we sense to be wrapped in truth. Seemingly random glimpses draw us further into the freedom of that space, whether through the spoken or written word, through the attitudes or actions of others, through flashes of inspiration, or through the limitless ways of God’s revelation in the world and in our lives.
In following the Spirit’s lead beyond the mists of confusion and uncertainty that have caused us to hold back, we rise sufficiently above our cluttered surroundings to see that there is an alternative to being anchored in the harbour of our familiar and comfortable life. We cannot break free of our links with the world, but we catch a glimpse of another way of living that is not confined and permanently moored by those links; we can rise yet further above our worldly selves, to discover the previously implausible possibility of breaking free from the hold of animal instincts and selfishness which form some of the links in our anchor chain.

We can think of Christ as the keystone in a structure that would otherwise collapse in ruins: a tower of solid and weighty stone built in defiance of the force of gravity, with the apex of the arch – the keystone – as the high point from which to survey the world around us, but without Jesus as a real presence in our lives we have merely placed Him aloft as a figurehead pointing into the wind while our boat remains firmly chained to the spot. He will lead the way if we will simply respond to His invitation to follow Him, but what do so many of us do? We confine His image safely within our minds and within our church buildings while disregarding the hand outstretched towards us. He would unchain us and raise us above all forces that hold us down. He would lift us into those wide open spaces where we would have the potential for learning the truth, the truth that enables us to see our daily ground-level days as they really are, and as He would have us see them.

Without a superior force working to strengthen our resistance and to lift our thoughts and desires above the world in which we live, the pressure of living in this world inevitably leads us to comply with our natural tendencies. The curve of a dam holding back the immense pressure of water behind it, in the same way as the keystone ties the whole arch together and turns gravity against itself, demonstrates the very power that would tear down these structures actually strengthening them and holding them together, but the tension is colossal. All the energy is expended on resistance, on remaining immovable; nothing is being achieved, and nobody is going anywhere. This is what we do as individuals, with our own self-selected religious frameworks, and it is what we can so easily do collectively with our unthinking or uninformed adherence to particular denominations, church buildings, selected individuals, or preferred forms of service, worship, or other prayerful expression.
It is time to trust in God’s promises, to let go and let God; time to end the blinkered life whether it be one of resistance or of selfish liaison with the superficial attractions of our physical existence. He will raise us above such struggles, and in so doing will reveal the reality and the truth concealed in the world around us; we shall recognize Him more clearly in the people we meet, and through that recognition shall more truly come to know ourselves.
Let us allow Him to raise us up, that we may have the truth revealed to us, and know ourselves to be among The Lifted.

'Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground
and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower,
and his garment is covered with dust.
Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

Deliverance?
Where is this deliverance to be found?
Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation;
he is bound with us all for ever.

Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense!
What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained?
Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.'

(‘Gitanjali’. Rabindranath Tagore)

The Catholic in me (3)

Despite nearly eighteen months without direct reference to it, my involvement and affinity with the Catholic Church has not been hidden from view. My lifelong awareness of, and continuing attraction to Stanbrook Abbey and its community of Benedictine nuns has been mentioned more than once, and my use of quotations from scripture known to be excluded from the Protestant Bible (Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus/Sirach) have also pointed to my allegiance.
The Benedictine Order has influenced my life in an unbroken litany of harmonies from my very early years. Stanbrook was the start-point, and now, many years later, it is firmly embedded as an unobtrusive but constant link to both my past and my future. Overlapping with this for some forty years, and taking its place for much of that time, has been the presence and undeniable influence of Benedictine monks from the monasteries at Douai and Downside. Both as parish priests, and, while a pupil at Douai School, as teachers and extraordinary examples of what we boys had the potential to become, they have wandered quietly through my years leaving a trail of unsolicited and, for the most part, unspoken guidance. As my parish priests their value has been appreciated while they were with us, but where my schooldays are concerned it is definitely hindsight that speaks; it is not that I failed to value them at the time, but my realization of their example is very much the product of a mature person’s reflections. Even as I write this I am drawn into an undefined sense of quiet and contentment that has brought a half-smile to my face. I cannot quite unravel it, though that is because I never really try to do so: I know there is no need, nothing to be gained: at a deeper level I am aware that I already understand, and searching for a way to describe and somehow capture it is a futile and wasteful exercise. Knowing that my recognition of such example is only made possible through having matured in a way that enables me to see it, brings to consciousness an inbuilt awareness that the focussing and refining of that enabling was itself conceived in the very example I am now able to acknowledge. It is one of those slowly turning meditations on life that at first appears to be a loop; once recognized as such I relax into a knowing expectation of the curve bringing me round to the point where I can believe I know what comes next, and can settle into the repetition: a new mantra with which to ride the comfort of my days.
How is it that I never seem to learn that I should presume nothing in my journey towards my God, and in my faltering steps towards becoming the person I should be ? It is not a meditative loop; it is a contemplative spiral that takes my feeble grasp of The Holy Spirit’s work in my life on an effortless learning curve, riding a thermal of spiritual warmth that carries me from my low-level and gentle perplexity to a higher level of awesome grace-filled awareness.

No matter how often I see them, I find it difficult not to stop when I see a buzzard wheeling in the skies above me. I watch in admiration of the raptor in my sight, but my mind is always edging back to a pair of Golden Eagles in the Scottish Highlands.
My son and I watched in wonder as they circled not far above us just off the edge of a cliff, wings unmoving in their display of utter mastery of their element. Our presence, far from disturbing them, seemed almost to be their reason for the display, as though God had whispered to them, “Show them what you can do. Let them see what happens when my creation becomes what it was made to be.” And so they did. After a few minutes, and having begun to climb away, one of them angled its wings slightly and at once moved away from above the cliff in the direction of the mountains on the other side of the valley. In no more time than it takes me to speak the words, its speed rapidly increased, and without a single wing-beat, it continued accelerating away, receding to invisibility in an astonishingly short space of time. We remained spellbound, unable to say anything much other than, ‘Awesome!’ For that truly was what it was. Something deep within me still suggests that God made the air because He had already crafted the Golden Eagle.

Just as watching Buzzards reminds me of those Eagles, so remembering the Eagles leads me to dwell on God’s longing to lift us above all that weighs down our spirits: He would carry us on those Eagles’ wings into the unpolluted airs of faith, and hope, and trust, there to point us in the right direction, that we may fly as bidden in answer to our vocation.
We are all called in some way. The Benedictines who have influenced me throughout my years were called to the religious life and to the priesthood, just as others have been called to other monastic orders and to the secular priesthood, but each one of us is called to something.
You and I, thinking of ourselves as ordinary, unexceptional, unqualified, unworthy and incapable of making any real contribution to God’s work in the world, must learn to see ourselves differently. Every one of us has something to offer, something in our makeup put there by God and which is of value to His mission, His people and His Church. The laity are no longer to sit meekly in the pews, accepting and absorbing in their weekly routines without waking, and discovering and carrying their gifts into the light where they can be seen and recognized, and where they can bear fruit. Most people never sit in the pews today, and what possible argument can be found to persuade them to do so? How little of apparent relevance to their own lives is found in anything related to that word ‘Church’, and, in the tangled mass of different and separate groups all professing to be Christian, where on earth is the truth?

In his book, ‘Sing a New Song’, Timothy Radcliffe OP, then Master of the Dominican Order, wrote, ‘Western culture is marked by a profound suspicion of all teaching, since it is equated with indoctrination and bigotry. The only valid truth is that which one has discovered for oneself or which is grounded in one’s feelings: ’If it feels right for me, then it is o.k.’ But teaching should liberate us from the narrow confines of our experience and our prejudices and open up the wide open spaces of a truth which no one can master. ... Doctrine should not indoctrinate but liberate us to continue on the journey.’
That is what I have found in my church life. ‘The wide open spaces of a truth which no one can master’ have been opened up for me, not by the teaching of individuals, and not by the teaching of the Catholic Church; nor have ‘the narrow confines of (my own) experience’ yielded anything truly worthwhile other than a heightened awareness of the gulf between myself and that which I seek. The teaching has been there, but the power and the influence have more surely come through the learning: the awakened receptiveness to that un-masterable truth which has shadowed all who would follow Jesus, from the time when He walked the dusty roads of Palestine to the present day. That learning rests confidently on the Catholic Church’s adherence and united commitment to the teachings of its founder, Jesus Christ: teachings that have been at the centre of its doctrine for two thousand years. I have been blessed with the freedom to walk along my path without a need for anything other than the truth: that truth which liberates us ‘from the narrow confines of our experience’, and from denominational differences. It is the truth which grants access to the meaningful experience beyond restrictive limits and rigid conformity: the experience of Jesus as a living friend, and the subsequently confirmed awareness of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives.

The Catholic in me (2)

Those who react in an instinctively adverse way to Catholicism and any mention of the word Catholic are in a minority, but even allowing for the amplifying of my awareness of their existence brought on by recent recollections, I know that minority is not as small as I would wish. In Great Britain and Ireland, and, to a lesser but still appreciable extent, in The U.S.A. and other English speaking parts of the world, the existence of such feeling is bolstered by the historical baggage we have carried from the Irish ‘Troubles’. This of course is a two sided coin, with strong anti-protestant feelings also having become part of the mindset of some Irish Catholics. But having mentioned this I now veer away once more; it would not be helpful to delve further. This is not meant to be a place for me to scribble whatever comes into my head regarding that history, or politics, or religion.
I could do that if I so wished, but my intention and my desire is to use it only as an expression of that which flows within me: that fullness of feeling and overflowing that steers me through my days and makes my daily living in this world such a gentle joy. That is what I long to be able to give, and what I would wish to become part of every person’s life.

More often than not, there is a discomfort to be overcome whenever a person admits openly to being a Christian for the first time. The pause in conversations that may follow, or the slightly awkward air about the people with whom we are speaking, is frequently taken to be the mild expression of distaste at what we have said, as though we have done something unpleasant or inappropriate. We feel that we may have created one of those view-changing moments for them, and it will take a while to find out if they will distance themselves from us. But with repeated admissions of our faith we become accustomed to hearing ourselves speaking aloud the words we have held silent within us for so long, and we come to appreciate that the apparent awkwardness of some hearers looks the same whether they wish we had not spoken, whether it is of no consequence to them, or whether they are delighted to hear us say it, but do not know how to respond.
There are many who may be helped to overcome their own discomfort, unvoiced admissions or questions, by hearing us say just a few words in a matter of fact way: no pronouncements or preaching, just making it known when the opportunity arises, that we believe in God, that we are Christians, that our lives revolve around our faith, and that life is so much richer because of it.

As Catholics we may be conscious of having another layer of awkwardness to overcome; we may have grown accustomed to admitting that we are Christians, but among people we do not know, we still hold back from saying we are Catholics until we have some idea of their own allegiances, if any. This second hurdle should not be there at all, and thankfully, in most minds, whether giving or receiving the information, it does not exist. It is a low level but inbuilt fear generated in some people by the incidents (like the one I have described) and the shocks of meeting those who have a clearly anti-Catholic mindset. We must always ensure that our perspective is aligned with reality, not skewed by the unreliable gauge of their utterances, whether in quantity or loudness.
As a result of the few incidents in my own life, I have to include myself among those who have encountered that second hurdle, not so much through a fear of finding myself in similar situations again, as through the feelings of inadequacy I have already mentioned: not having the answers, not knowing enough about the Church of which I consider myself a part.
My writing here could be taken as evidence of that; until recently I have not mentioned anything directly related to Catholicism and have not made it known that I am a Catholic. I admit that this has been deliberate, but the reasons are not as they may seem.

I have always been very aware of those people who are just out of reach: those who are searching and seeking and longing, but who, in spite of seeing something they want in the Christians and the church communities around them, are unable to approach us.
Are you one of those people? It is you, and others like you, who have been very much in my mind from the moment I thought of creating this blog, and because of my first hand experiences, and having no way of knowing what influences you may have had in your own lives, I have been niggled by the thought that some of you may easily be turned away by any mention of a specific church or denomination, Catholic or otherwise.
I now feel somewhat differently though I am unsure as to why. Perhaps it is a natural growth of openness resulting from the effects upon me of having thought and written here for nearly eighteen months: a sense of having got to know someone better that enables me to relax more in your company, as though I have been actually walking and talking with you.
That is precisely how I got to know Jesus better; I relaxed, and as everything seemed to begin falling apart around me, He was right there beside me. We became inseparable friends when, for a period, He walked every step of my journey with me.
In this case however, unlike my meeting with Jesus, I have not met anyone, and I am unable to overrule the thought that this whole process may be a Spirit-led venture, as much for my own benefit as for anything else. After all, the one person this has helped me to come to know a little better is myself.
Is that not what God wants from us all? To find our true selves and to live life in all its glorious fullness?
We were born to become the persons God made us to be, and in doing so, to give glory to Him who created us and who sustains us in all that we do.

There is a ‘Search Blog’ button at the top of this page. Presumably there is one on every blog, but until now I had failed to notice it. That in itself is like the presence of God in our lives: always there, so quick, so willing, and so able to answer our questions and to find and yield the very things we are searching for; not standing out from the crowd, unobtrusive and quietly waiting for us to come to Him. Unseen and unrecognized until we look with different eyes, and then un-missable and unforgettable.
I searched my own blog for the words below, and the results relate to all that I have written here before 30th April.
In a total of 87 posts the word ‘Catholic’ appeared in only one (20.02.08), and that arose only through writing about the word ‘separatist’ in relation to Northern Ireland. 'Christian’ was written in 7 posts, ‘Christ’ in 14, ‘Holy Spirit’ appeared in 19, ‘Jesus’ in 27, and ‘God’ was included in 66 posts.
Being a Catholic is important to me, but in the present context, I think that result is not too far from the way it should be.

.
God is all, and all is God’s? Yes!

Jesus is alive and present among us? Yes.
The Holy Spirit teaches and guides us? Yes.
I believe that Jesus is Christ? Yes.

I call myself a Christian? Yes.

I am a Catholic? Yes.

The Catholic in me (1)

A month has now passed since the CatholicBlogs.com search window first appeared at the foot of these pages.
Weeks earlier, after pondering on the significance or otherwise of my increasing urge to state that the Catholic Church is my spiritual home, I had intended posting something relating to this, but -as has occurred so frequently- whenever I sat down to write, something other than my original intention provided the subject for my thoughts.
These accidental delays have provided an admittedly minute but nonetheless interesting contribution to my suspicions that, even in the barely visible and scarcely known corners of individual lives, thoughts, and values, subjects which can arouse strong feelings and reactions of a more obvious nature in the world at large, are alive and well. The embers of inbuilt discontent, distrust, distaste, and even of disgust: of disdain, discord and disunity, are aglow beneath a merely superficial covering of ash.
The greyness of the ash has no intended link with the monochrome horizons of my previous post, but rather represents the essential barrier of ignorance and misunderstanding without which the embers cannot be successfully smoored against the long and empty hours of darkness. In some people the hidden glow of their disaffection must never be allowed to diminish: it is an undeniable part of their whole way of thinking and of being; indoctrination and bigotry have spawned a mindset that is savoured with pride and a confidence in the sole possession of the truth. The long dark hours linger for life: in too many of us, they will last for as long as the life that clings to them.
Access to the truth has been disowned. ‘Christianity’ has become a banner-slogan waved by different groups as they face each other, manning and strengthening the barricades that keep them apart. The very word that proclaims truth and community in the following of Christ is wielded as a weapon of war in the very hearts of those whose hallucinations include exclusivity rights to that which Jesus gave for all mankind, and a factional solidarity that hides behind an ashen mask disguised as unity.

We have all experienced those brief moments when something happens, or is said, that suddenly changes our way of seeing a person forever. This can involve any facet of life and our interactions with each other, so it is no surprise that our spiritual leanings and awareness are not exempt from such jarring. My own such moments have taken years to build into my present saddened consciousness of the way the whole concept of unity has been disowned by so many who profess to be Christians. This perpetuates one of the most basic and destructive failures of the followers of Christ, for which none of us can entirely exclude ourselves from blame.
The one moment that perhaps lodged in my memory more than any other, occurred when I visited the home of a delightful middle-aged couple in a well-to-do area of Kent. I was delivering an item they had purchased from me, and, having never met them before, was at once put at ease by their welcome and by the obvious pleasure they derived from seeing their new acquisition ‘in the flesh’.
Shared interests discovered over cups of tea led to the beginnings of what could have become real friendship, and having already stayed far longer than intended, we progressed to their family and the proudly displayed photographs. At a point in this happy gathering when the lady had gone upstairs to find something she wished to show me, she suddenly called loudly down to her husband, “Quick! Look out of the window! She’s sitting on the wall.” The husband quickly rose and crossed to the window; his facial expression became a combination of disbelief and suppressed anger as he turned and hurried out to the hallway on his way to the front door. Before he reached it his wife called down again, “She’s gone! ... Dear God!”
Amid the “Did you see that”s, and the “I don’t believe it”s, she came down the stairs to rejoin the two of us in the hallway. My uncertainty regarding the urgency of what was happening had led me there in case I could be of any help, and as their anger subsided they became aware that I would have had no idea what was going on. It was soon explained, and clearly the presumption was that I would feel the appropriate indignation on their behalf. One of their neighbours, who apparently made a habit of doing such unforgivable things, had been seen sitting on the low boundary wall which ran along the pavement outside their hedge. I found it difficult to find any logical reason for such likeable people becoming so incensed by such an incident, but then, after a short pause, and spoken with considerable venom, came the words that would make everything clear.
They did make it clear – but not, I think, in the way intended.
“... and she’s CATHOLIC !”
Such an unexpected utterance left me shocked for a moment, and it must have shown. After a few seconds silence I said quietly, that whatever their neighbour had done to offend them was down to her as an individual, and certainly had nothing to do with whether or not she was a Catholic. Another silence as we returned to the lounge, and then, disbelievingly and rather sheepishly, the wife asked, “You’re not a Catholic are you ?” A few awkward minutes more and I was on my way home.

It is not only the experience itself that has lodged within me, but the lingering knowledge that I had been at a complete loss as to what I should have done or said. Perhaps, in that particular place at that particular time, all that was needed of me was done, but what if they had asked further questions? What if they had begun to direct their inappropriate fire at my own admitted allegiance? Or had verbally attacked Catholics or Catholicism in general? And what if, somewhere deep beneath the layers of ash that kept their embers so hot, there also burnt a hidden will to answer Our Lord’s call to unity? I was in no position to stand up for myself, my fellow Catholics, or the Catholic Church.
Standing up to be counted, yes; being present to others as a Catholic, yes; but to discuss, to have the answers to questions, to know the facts ... no: I was not competent: I was not able: I was a Catholic in name, by nature, and through experience, but ...

It is only over the last two years that my thoughts on this have been resurrected. Surely I should be able to defend my beliefs and those of others around me; and is this not something we are all required to do? Perhaps my continuing uncertainty is born of a corresponding lack of decisiveness in interpreting my own faith: my understanding of my God, and His will for me and for all mankind.
It all comes down to two simple but enormous questions: - exactly what is it that I really believe? - and in which (if any) of the diverse denominations and sub-divisions under the broad heading of the Christian Church, do my beliefs find their conception, their baptism, their growth, and their confirmation in loving and forgiving community with Christ’s followers?

The small contribution to my suspicions that arose from the unobtrusive insertion of the Catholic Blogs search on this site, was the change in the general area of numerical placing of the blog in ‘Blog Topsites’ which is also at the foot of the page.
The numbers visiting are small, but most days there is someone somewhere reading these pages, and that confirms to me that I must continue with my soliloquy, but in the past, whenever I have posted something new, the Topsites number has decreased noticeably, showing that the presence of readers has, as it were, sent the blog further up the charts. Since the implied Catholicism appeared, this has been less apparent, and the assumption must be that even without my confirmation that the writer is a Catholic, some regular readers have abandoned ship rather than continue receiving whatever nourishment it was that they found here.
Seeing those first eight letters of CatholicBlogs.com must have been one of those brief moments for them, when suddenly, in phobic fashion, the flavour became completely unacceptable.
Heaven forbid that they should hear the views or appreciate the thoughts of a Catholic!

‘Blow on a spark and up it flares,
spit on it and out it goes;
both are the effects of your mouth.’
(Ecclesiasticus 28:12)

Glorious

‘He veils the sky with clouds,
and provides the earth with rain,
makes grass grow on the hills ...’
(Psalms 147:8)

Without doubt each one of us has been gifted with a wider range of talents and abilities than we are likely to be given credit for.
That is how it should be, as the credit is not ours to receive: not for the abilities we use openly, nor for those of which we are aware but which we keep hidden, and, in the eyes and mind of no man should we ever be credited for those of which we ourselves remain unaware. For any ability or particular attribute received, credit is due to the source of the gift; the Giver is the genius, the worker of wonders, and the power that awakens the gift within us as we respond to His call in our encounters with sorrow, fear, injustice and despair in the lives of others. I believe it was Aristotle who said, 'Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.' Even in the most unbelieving hearts and minds, our talents are of little use on the wider expanses of this life and in the grand scheme of things, if they are used only for our own ease and pleasure, accumulation and ultimately futile advancement.
But it is not only the wonderful ‘above nature’ gifts God has given us that we can so easily neglect or hide, or even deny. The very fact that we have life is itself an awesome gift, and one we fail to recognize every day. Being alive involves countless processes, interconnections and inter-reliances that together maintain this temporary form that houses the creative miracle that is us. Our life as people upon this astonishing planet is utterly filled with the inherent gifts we overlook with every step and every breath we take.

The reasons that drove me towards the articulation of thoughts, and the subsequent writing that has conjured these pages from the mists that swirl around and within me, were, and still are, centred on our need to become the people we were made to be. My own increasing awareness that my journey to date has been of far greater importance than I could ever previously have realized, has brought with it a heightened sense of urgency with regard to the need for others to persevere with their journeys toward becoming the fully realized men and women God created them to be, and the need for those not yet walking their paths to find that indefinable spark, that moment’s pause, that strange inner glance, whatever the particular trigger may be for each of them to begin to discern that distant kaleidoscope of hope, love and light on their presently monochrome horizons.
And there, in that un-colourful word, is a reminder of what we regard as the everyday things of this life either obscuring what lies beyond, or hiding the beauty of their own truth within their too familiar sights and sounds, and scents and feelings. I could easily have refrained from describing other people’s horizons as being monochrome; In earlier years I would have anticipated voices with their ‘How dare you ...’ , and ‘What gives you the right ...’ , but from the reserves of excuses lying within our hearts, we can all conjure reasons to not do almost anything.

The word would not have been in my mind if it were not for the sort of day it has been, with occasional brightness, but clouds, heavy showers and mists making it a predominantly monochrome one.
The greening of the countryside with its Cowslip yellow, and the simple glory and natural purity of white and green that is the damp woodland carpets of flowering Ramsons, can never be made monochrome, but yesterday evening, having gone from the former to the even deeper peace of such Wild-Garlic scented woods gracing the western slopes of the Malvern Hills, I left their cleansing and healing power behind as I rose onto the bare hilltops above the Gullet Quarry.
My progress was purposeful – as it almost always is when I come here – but while always drawn to give silent praise to God by the natural wonders through which I pass, I rarely stop unless for physical reasons: the need to catch my breath, or in response to urgent pleadings from legs when climbing steeply to this point. But this time I had to stop, not out of physical necessity, but in obedience to God’s gentle unspoken word.
“Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalms 46:10) With the display that awaited me, I could not have done otherwise.

“Stand! Be still! Acknowledge me, recognize me, know me for who I am.

All that is in the world is mine. Look! Open your eyes and see: I lay my glance and my touch on all before you.

Behold! My glory fills all heaven and earth.

You have brought yourself to me, and I reveal the glory in which I would have you bathe.

You have seen me in the ablutions of thundery rain, of dripping boughs, of trickled streams and soaking pools; you have prepared yourself as did my people of old. Their following of my Law, their preparations, their focus on my Presence in the Temple was tied to my covenant of preparation, my laying of foundations for my gift to all mankind: my Son, the world’s Saviour, your Redeemer.

My Temple now is where it has always been; it is time for mankind to see: it is time to grasp the fullness of all that has been revealed; it is above and beneath you, it is all around you: it is within you, and your coming to me is your part in the building of my dream: my Kingdom: my Will in all that I have made.

Behold! I reveal myself to you in cloud and rain, in swirling mist and caressing air, in swallowed horizon and obscured valley, in grumbling skies, in passing brilliance of sunlight shafts, in atmosphere laden with the water of life, in drenched rock, in sodden turf, and in wallowing mud.

Be still, and know that I am God.”

The magical scene spread before me was colourless, utterly monochrome, with every greyness – brooding and bright – from charcoal depths right through to bespangled and shimmering silver. With all woodland pattering of drips and drops left behind, and the last whispers of rain now ceased after the downpours: with the air held still, mists poised in suspense and no longer riding the billows of treetop and hillside, the only sound reached softly down from the vastness above me. The immensity, and the incomprehensible beauty of simplicity, spoke in creation’s muffled and slowly receding basso profundo, “Behold !” ........ “Behold !”................ ”Behold !”

‘... then the Temple was filled with the cloud of the glory of God.' (2 Chronicles 5:13)

Lord, lead every person to the time, the word, the touch, the spark, the gift, the loss, the joy or the pain, that will cause them to pause for that first moment, that first wondering, that first questioning.
Draw them into an awareness of Your Presence; lead all who already seek your face, to walk beside them on their journey into the wonders hid within seemingly colourless lives.

‘Acclaim The Lord, all the earth,
serve The Lord with gladness,
come into His presence with songs of joy!’
(Psalms 100:1,2)

... or free ?

Around the base of the tree – then only a few centimetres in diameter - there had always been a tump of grass, and with that part of the garden only being worked when it was cleared of growth at the end of summer, when the wild flowers had all set their seed, that was almost unseen. Until the year when I randomly chose to remove the tump I had not been aware that most of the bulk was not grass but an ants nest. It had built up the soil around the tree to some twenty centimetres above normal ground level, creating conditions that tended towards those resulting from planting too deep. Being an ants nest the soil would have been kept aerated by tunnels and passages, never forming into a completely solid mound of earth, and I assume it was this that prevented the death of the tree. It may not have died, but year after year the effects were well nigh insurmountable.
Having removed everything down to level ground I had wondered whether it would make any difference and hoped the tree might gradually pick up over the next few years. It did not take that long. The following spring the leaves arrived as usual, but then it transformed itself; it grew rapidly, flourishing, blossoming and bearing abundant fruit by the time I next took my sickle to clear the ground around it. It has since gone from strength to strength, and though it was always hoping to be, longing to be, and striving to be a pear tree, it was only when the intended fruit were finally produced that it could proclaim itself to be so.

These thoughts have been brought to mind by the picture of a tree on a book cover: a line drawing or engraving that shows a mature tree with a correspondingly full canopy and substantial root system. But it also shows the ground level as being half way up the length of the trunk; this completely contradicts one of the general rules that enable a tree to reach the level of maturity shown, and it was this that brought me out into the garden to view this year’s first blossoms opening, a proof of life in all its fullness without which this pear tree could never have borne fruit.

We cannot avoid the world in which we live. For as long as we live upon it we are of this place, but we are not made to wallow in it.
The seed of something far beyond our physical being is sown into our very existence, and the innocent awareness of that otherness glows in every infant and young child. We are called to recognize and follow that ‘first light’: to nurture it when retained, to search for it and rekindle it when lost, for it will never go out. It is always there to lead us back to where we are meant to be.
If, for whatever reason, we are buried too deeply in the world, we will not flourish.
If, in whatever way, our minds are too deeply engrossed with the world or any aspect of it, we cannot turn our spirit to matters beyond our day to day life, and without that ability we cannot increase our willingness to look in that direction.
Without looking we shall never see, and without a willingness to do so how shall we begin our search ?
Without reason to search we will fail to hunger and thirst, and without such needs how shall we pull ourselves out from the mire ?
How shall we feel the yearning and generate the longing that leads us to find our place in the world ? – with our feet firmly upon it, our charity laid out for all mankind, but with our hearts and minds rising above it ?

How ? By tapping into the life giving streams that will feed us and bring us to the place God made us to fill.
The sap is rising, not only in the trees around us but within ourselves; we know it all too well. It is part of our physical makeup, welling up within us as lust, anger, greed, gluttony, all those surges of feeling that have the power to swamp our inner convictions and our rationality.
We cannot rise above such things alone; in this life our feet will be forever anchored to the world: we cannot be completely done with such feelings while we still live. What enables us to conquer all that would rise within us, is the spiritual equivalent of the finely-falling and life-giving rain in which I stood while contemplating the pear tree: God’s grace; and the equivalent of the birch-sap surging into every extremity of its tree as shown by the drip, drip - as though of tears: God’s overflowing provision for each one of us.
God’s grace is freely given: it is there for you, for me, for everyone. Dear Lord, wherever would I be without it ?
And we are beckoned to the source of life, to the wellspring of spiritual sap that has the power to calm the flow of all that rises naturally within us. If we do our best to disconnect our taproot from the attractions and distractions of the world, gaining nourishment instead by grafting ourselves onto the ever-blossoming, ever-fruitful, ever-living vine that is our Saviour, our Shepherd and our Guide, we shall find ourselves within reach of our full potential, blossoming and bearing the fruit for which we were made.

“As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself,
unless it remains part of the vine,
neither can you unless you remain in me.
I am the vine,
you are the branches.
Whoever remains in me, with me in him,
bears fruit in plenty ...”
(John 15:4-5)

Slave ...?

Standing on moss soaked by rain, with barely more than a heavy mist still falling upon me, I am surrounded by nature’s unstoppable surge into hope and fulfilment.
Everything in the garden and surrounding countryside has begun the wonderful process of bursting forth into new growth, into bud and into green, into blossom and into eventual fruitfulness. This gentle fall of moisture is matched by the unseen upward flow in every plant around me, and nothing brings that home more than the constant dripping from the cut ends of small branches trimmed late from a still bare looking Birch tree. The sap is rising: awakening, rousing, moving, growing, yearning and praising: bursting forth into exuberance and a maximized potential of nature’s inbuilt compliance with God’s will. Life itself is rising from the earth, lifting itself from the solidity of the ground that spawned it to find unimagined expression in becoming what it was planned to be.

There are many general rules we all follow without thought and without question. Our health and happiness, our general wellbeing, and even life itself depends upon this automatic adherence to what we may regard as being common sense.
We need to breathe fresh air, and remaining in a sealed space will eventually deprive us of essential oxygen. Understanding this gives us the knowledge that, for example, children should not place plastic bags over their heads. We do not step off a kerb and walk across a busy road without first looking and listening; we do not leave pans of boiling water unattended on the hob, and we do not turn on gas appliances without igniting the gas.
There are general rules in everything, and whenever we use our initiative and resourcefulness to bend or steer natural processes to suit our own inclinations or appetites, we can easily fail to recognize or ignore some of them. This is not an inbuilt part of us as human beings, but it is an inherent part of the arrogance that afflicts so much of humankind.
Some rules may not be so obvious, and even when recognized are not always accepted as meaningful. They are seen more as widely repeated coincidences that have become the norm, and are thus dismissed as having no particular value in the web of interactions that have combined to make our world the way it is. Rising sea levels, deforestation, drought, overcrowding, poverty, famine, pollution, - the list goes on and on. All such things are consequences of our unthinking attitude to the world in which we live, and, even more ashamedly, our selfish disregard for our fellow human beings.

The rapidly greening trees and bushes around me are the product of some of these general rules having been left undisturbed and undisputed, but the particular tree I have been drawn outside to look at is worth the look only because I changed the circumstances in which it had been struggling to live.
Several years passed without my noticing anything particular about it, and several more during which I wondered why it did not seem to be growing much. Every year it came into leaf, looked healthy enough throughout the summer, shed its leaves in autumn and ended up looking almost the same as the previous year. It was clearly alive but was not really growing. It was going nowhere and achieving nothing. It was born of the ground upon which it stood, but all possibility of maturity and bearing fruit was in some way still buried deep in that ground. I am reminded once more that, until more recently, I have never thought of myself as a gardener; those years would not have left the tree untended had I truly been one.

I have always known that when planting or transplanting trees, they should be placed no deeper into the soil than they were when in their original position. It is one of those general but important rules. The Royal Horticultural Society advice includes the following:
‘It is often assumed that the most vulnerable part of a tree is the canopy or rootball but the stem collar is highly susceptible to damage such as physical impact damage from garden machinery and the slower, less obvious, but often terminal, effects of planting at the wrong depth.’
The tree before me had not been planted or transplanted by anything other than nature’s own progress. It grew where it had begun its life, and I suppose I had the automatic assumption that it would therefore sort things out correctly for itself.
I have also read elsewhere that, ‘If the stem collar is submerged in soil the bark is liable to rot resulting in the gradual death of the tree.’ This makes no mention, nor even hints of a person being involved in the process, and, if I had previously read and absorbed these words, perhaps I would have appreciated the situation years earlier.
I love trees. They have already come into my thoughts here more than once, including their need for help when in the stranglehold of Ivy, but here again is an example of my failure to recognize a need.

How easily we are caught up in living our own lives, and how readily our preoccupations make us blind to the needs of others, even those closest to us and whom we dearly love.
And could the world as a whole be further removed from the way our consciences tell us that it should be ?
Are we not disregarding one of this life’s general, basic but essential rules ?
How unlike the early Christian community ...

‘None of their members was ever in want ...’ (Acts 4:34)

A hillside seat

No other person has ever been able to provide for the needs of everyone, and nor shall such a one be found in the future unless it be Jesus Himself.
With loaves and fishes the superficial need for food was satisfied, and this added to the fascination of the crowd that followed Him. That need was superficial in that it was not urgent: nobody was starving. We are told that the people were hungry, but their hunger was not yet so great that they would return to their homes; they still hungered more for the experience of being part of the crowd in the presence of this man they had heard about and talked about, listened to, and had themselves seen doing amazing things. The physical hunger was overridden by their hunger for the experience: their enthusiasm for the charismatic presence of Jesus and their anticipation of further remarkable happenings. They had not followed Him into the countryside just to leave Him when they got hungry, and later to learn that they had missed the highlight of the day. Something similar may have already happened to some of them and they would not want to hear their friends repeating the same excited words, “Oh, you should have stayed ! You’ll never believe what happened !”

That same enthusiasm and apparent need for the feeling, the sensation, the experience, influences us today.
We can be so engrossed in something that we lose track of time, suddenly realizing that hours have passed unnoticed. We are ‘awakened’ by the phone ringing, by someone arriving home, by a sudden realization that it is getting dark, or that dawn is breaking. Though there are aspects of this which may be annoying and frustrating, as well as others which raise the possibility of unwelcome consequences, the blanketing effect is not only over the exterior and physical awareness – such as the passage of time and hunger – but also over any consciousness of what our deepest needs really are. Our hunger for the experience swamps us completely, leaving us not only without a sense of ongoing purpose and lacking a realization that we have come to a halt on our spiritual journey, but with a contrary belief that we have suddenly been lifted and carried forward along our path. We feel we have arrived somewhere; we are in Our Lord’s presence, and we think all we have to do is remain where we are, basking in expectation and enthusiasm, watching and waiting for what happens next. Surely He will provide for us; He will not let us go hungry.
We have, as it were, seated ourselves beside other spectators on a dusty hillside. We have set up camp among the five thousand hungry followers of Jesus. Having heard about Him, and having found ourselves drawn to Him, we have gone through the psychological turnstile and eagerly await the performance. We wonder what He will do next.

That for which He searches our hearts and minds, the deeper and greater need we each have buried within us, is obscured by our sensational and emotional excitement. Jesus is Jesus. He did things we could never dream of doing, but in confirming this truth within ourselves, we tend to blind ourselves with regard to those things of which we are in fact capable. We negate all hope of discovering and activating the gifts with which we have been endowed: the abilities we have been called to use for the benefit of our neighbours near and far, and for the furtherance of God’s will for all mankind.
In any self-assessment – unlikely to have resulted from a conscious decision – we will, in all probability, limit the scope of any perceived possibilities to a mere shadow of our true potential. Some will chase off to the opposite extreme, and they may be even less likely to find where they are meant to be. Hurrying in any direction is likely to be evidence of completely missing, or at least misinterpreting our guidance and spiritual instruction. Our sense of direction is confused and we are swamped again. We think we are ready to risk walking on water, but we are still on dry land: we did not even board the boat.

In His provision of food for the crowd Jesus showed how easily people in general can be satisfied by the availability of superficial satisfaction, the comfort of a physical need fulfilled quelling all conscious dissatisfaction with the barren wasteland that is their inner life. If some were conscious of anything beyond the free meal itself, the stunning reality for many would have been the provision of the food, whereas the truly miraculous was not this sign but the presence among them of the man who wrought it in their midst. The human body does not live long without being fed and watered, but the real food on offer that day was the word of God: the life-bringing words of Jesus. Ultimate truth pronounced by the Word of God Himself, incarnate and seated among them on a previously empty hillside. Eventually most will have wandered away without noticing or acknowledging this truth, content with having been there and with having had the experience.

In his ‘Ascent of Mount Carmel’ (II:VII), St John of The Cross writes of spiritual persons who ‘... think that it suffices to deny themselves worldly things without annihilating and purifying themselves of spiritual attachment.’ Our longing for the feelings, and our wallowing in emotions associated with spiritual experience are seductive examples of that attachment. Even more than the physical food, this distracts us from our journey and keeps us from hungering to do as Christ would have us do. As St John goes on to say, we ‘... seek only sweetness and delectable communion with God. This is not self-denial, and detachment of spirit, but spiritual gluttony.’
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With meaning

How careful we have to be in choosing our words if we are to successfully convey our intended meaning.
Whatever the particular words may be, they have their own specific meaning or range of meaning and this is unchanging. The words themselves convey their own truth, and, if we are to leave the hearer or the reader with the intended understanding, any choice of interpretation has to be narrowed right down by the context in which those words are being used as well as by our considered use of supplementary words and careful use of grammar. And still we can get it wrong through the simple fact that we have spoken aloud or shared our written words with others. We are no more able to transfer the fullness of our thoughts and feelings to the minds of others than we can fully share that which fills our hearts. Even when the words have flowed from what fills the heart and their production has been heartfelt, they carry no guarantee of being received in the same way. The best we can hope for is to get close to their doing so for at least some of those who give attention to what we say.

Clearly there are vast areas in which the numbers of potential hearers has no bearing whatever on the audibility of the message -“those who have ears to hear” again - but even among those who may show interest, or who are searching hard for something to touch their own spirit, the words, and the way of writing or speaking must suit their own inner world if they are to receive what we are striving to offer.
What the actual situation is for any of us remains unknown, but it is obvious that a well known name in a person’s particular field of interest will have a far greater reach and influence than a random unknown voice such as my own. However, anyone using words on any subject, in any way other than in idle chatter, must assume that someone somewhere is listening; without that assumption their efforts are pointless and will remain forever sterile, and that is not what words are about.

I have my own way of thinking about this in relation to my own words.
As a start-point I have my reasons for beginning this ‘Soliloquy at The Very Edge’, as already spoken of in various earlier posts. My sense of having been filled to overflowing remains, and though it seems to ebb and flow in different directions the underlying feeling is still of brimming over: of having no control over something that quietly wells up within and flows ceaselessly into the world around me. The sense of indestructible peace this has generated in my life is undeniable but unexplainable. Though I may try to explain it at times I am aware that it is in fact beyond words; it is beyond whatever fills my heart. It is beyond my ability to explain because it is beyond my ability to fully comprehend; and the reason for that is simply because it is not from within me: it has been poured into me from without. It is sometimes tear-jerkingly, and always awe-inspiringly from beyond.
This peace is not a prompting as such for me to do anything, but is so significant in my life, and so much something I wish everyone could share in, that it has the same effect: it is part of my reason for being here, and without it I am sure I would not be filled to the brim and would not be continually drawn to the edge. It is a peace born of having had burdens lifted and of having been lifted from the dust; another step along the way (see 06.01.07 post). ‘You have raised me up. You have healed me Lord.’

The product of this is my belief that I have something to say. I still do not know what it is, but I am still here in the hope that some of it will leak out among the words that I pray do not overly confuse, distract or detract from my own journey or from anyone else’s.
If any of us feels we have something to say we should firmly believe that someone somewhere wants to hear it. I believe that in my own case and would urge you to that same belief in relation to your own thoughts and words. A God given confidence has to start somewhere, and this could be the starting point for you. How can we begin to move towards His will for us, towards becoming the people we are meant to be, without a confidence that He is calling us to follow, not from some far off place but from right beside us and from within us ?
I tell myself that one in every ten people who come to and view these pages just might linger long enough to wonder whether ... ? ... and of these perhaps half may find something that makes them stay a little longer (one in twenty).

Our interests may be many and varied, they overlap, they wax and they wane, and it takes time for interest, questioning and wondering to develop into the recognizable beginnings of a journey. I count on only one in five of these to stay the course long enough to become one of my unknown companions.
I am now down to one in a hundred, and this is where I tell myself I may be needed – but for three out of every four of these it will be for a brief period only. For them, I am perhaps part of God’s provision for them during a short stage of their journey; they may walk with me for a while until they are helped further along the way through their own encounters with truth. For one it will be the love and the touch of God the Father, for another the presence of The Risen Lord: the reality of Jesus in their life. For the third it will be the indwelling and power of the Holy Spirit that lifts them into a whole new life. They will meet further down the road when the ungraspable truths of the Holy Trinity become an intangible reality for them.
And what of the fourth ? The one person in every four hundred who stumble upon my words ?
This is the man or woman who, though hopefully finding their rebirth with the other three, also has need of a more tangible and fallible fellow traveller: a fellow sinner who continues to struggle along the way but who is resolved never to give up the search.

This fellow sinner is me.
And that one person in four hundred is the one for whom I most need to continue speaking from the heart.

All this is simply a way I have of trying to rationalize something which cannot be assessed and calculated in that way.

It is meaningless other than as a reminder that if my words are helpful to anyone – to only one – my efforts are worthwhile. It helps to anchor my belief that everything I feel compelled to do is of some importance: that it is filled with meaning. And if there were ever to be a group of twelve of us, separate, unknown, yet still companions for the journey, that number would be the remnant of four thousand eight hundred people who had found this spot. The fact that there are billions of us is not relevant; we are each called to do our bit, wherever we are, and I have found a way of attempting to help in the feeding of five thousand.

‘May the words of my mouth always find favour,
and the whispering of my heart,
in your presence, Lord,
my rock, my redeemer.’
(Psalms 19:14)

Beyond compromise

'Words flow out of what fills the heart.’
A heart that is full cannot fail to find some way of bringing its fullness to expression, whether that be through a naturally generated and unthinking attitude to life and the world, or through a leaking out of emotion, the increasing pressure of which refuses to be contained within anything corresponding to the self. Both give expression to the underlying mindset and the moral, social, ethical and spiritual values of the individual, but whereas the former will, in some way and to a greater or lesser extent, colour not only words but thoughts and actions in all circumstances, the latter may produce a similar reaction and outcome but infrequently, unexpectedly and seeming randomly in even the smallest of situations. The one makes it impossible to hide whatever truly rules one’s life in spite of occasional strong feelings that seem to witness in an opposite direction; the other makes it impossible to contain an expanding compulsion to say or to do something, even when this may be contrary to all the ingrained and accustomed traits of the person’s character.
Examples of the former would be people who are truly humble, and those who are blindly arrogant. Those whose lives are based on a notable degree of goodness or of badness are unable to disguise their true colours other than fleetingly. Unless we live in the impossibly narrow ‘no-man’s land’ that is a perfect balance between the two – and such a compromise can never be regarded as good – we should be aware of our inclusion in this group, but, to the degree that is appropriate to each of us, most of us are also examples of the latter. It is our fundamental goodness or badness that, however well we have managed to keep it under wraps, will at some point become un-containable: it will burst free from the confines of our heart.

A perfect balance between good and evil could be mistakenly sensed and experienced as a state of calm, of quiet and of peace. In its withstanding of the pressures, temptations and inclinations to allow a natural drift towards an unquestioned response to our animal tendencies, it could be proclaimed as a victory of spirit over nature, of true humanity - as shown to us in its perfect form by Jesus Himself - over mere animality, a conquest of good over evil. This is one of many self-deceptions into which we may be led by our reliance upon our senses and our interpretations of experience.
Such a balance, if it exists at all, is fleeting: it is impossible to maintain. If we find ourselves in such a state the calm is unreal; the quiet and the apparent peace offer no contentment and no safety from darkness and fear. The balance is maintained only by a tension that constantly strains its tethers to the limit, stretching them so taut that the stillness in which we find ourselves agonizes on the verge of tearing itself asunder; the impossibility of sustaining the tension destroys all peace even while we believe it to exist. We cannot occupy such a place; it is truly a ‘no-man’s land’: a place where no person belongs, where there is no place for either side, where even life and death cannot be as they are meant to be.
To briefly find oneself in such a place is not to be at the edge in any meaningful and potentially edifying way; it is to perch dangerously on the knife edge of a ridge with no possibility of prolonged survival without falling to one side or the other. As soon as a tendency in one direction or the other makes itself known, we are gone. Compassion, anger, frustration, grief, joy, longing, desire, fear, hatred, love ... something triggers an undeniable inner response and we speak, or we act: we are unable to resist an honest response to our compulsion.

The perfection of human life shown to us by Jesus is not a compromise that results in evil being immobilized and merely held at bay; it is a blossoming of goodness that bears fruit in the complete neutering and disarming of badness. It is a conquest of all that tries to undermine the goodness that lies within each of us: it does not destroy evil but rises above it in a way that enables us to stride easily and confidently over what had once appeared to be insurmountable barriers.

The balance then is not what we seek: it is not our aim.

We are called to be ourselves, and in following that call we are led towards becoming the persons we were made to be.
We are called to goodness and into the light, to stand as beacons above the entanglements of our shadowy world.

We are called to respond to the fullness of our hearts: to speak out and act in accordance with whatever guidance we may receive.

We will know that prompting when it comes. It will be impossible to deny.

“For I am full of words
and forced to speak by a spirit within me;
within me, it feels like new wine seeking a vent,
bursting out of new wine-skins.
To gain relief, I must speak,
I must open my lips and reply.”
(Job 32:18-20)