A cautionary tale

Usually the day passes uneventfully.  17th January: the feast of Saint Antony of the Desert.  But it is a date which never slips by without stirring memories and without placing me in a form of anticipation which suspends my usual day-to-day way of being.  A date which cannot be forgotten; it has produced, in ways that, for me, are well beyond mere coincidence, events which are irreversibly embedded in the deep inner story of my life. The possibility that any relevance these events (however few) might have could be in my imagination alone is repeatedly swept away by the fact that they have occurred on that same date.

The result has been that every year, the same thought arises – What might this day bring?

This year, as the day drew towards its close, with anticipation having dwindled away and the date almost forgotten, I was given a piece of news about someone I have admired greatly since first meeting him, and whose departure from my home area some years ago stirred in me an unexpectedly deep sense of loss. In fact, he was the last in a sequence of three whose leaving had disturbed me to a surprising extent.

Strangely, but of no particular relevance, it has only been since hearing the item of news that I have learned – more than twenty years after his leaving – that the first of these three was born on 17th January.

Receiving that particular piece of information sent me through a sequence of thoughts and feelings which came and went with remarkable rapidity, leaving me still numb, much sorrowed, and somehow hollow: emptied; but with just the one continuing and persistent train of thought: an unanticipated and inexplicable concern for his wellbeing. A sense that there is far too much at stake here to allow myself to sweep all the good that has gone before into some far corner, as close to oblivion as I can manage. 

And yet ...  How can this be?  Not the news only, but also my seemingly contradictory reactions to it?

With no graspable threads of explanation or mitigation, or suggestions of misunderstanding, or merest hint of mistaken identity or false accusation – all such have apparently been annihilated by his own admission – how can my present underlying feeling be one of concern for him?

However impossible it can sometimes seem, we are called never to withhold our forgiveness, just as we would hope never to find ourselves utterly unforgivable, whatever we may have done. I have no deep wish to forgive where others never can, but I do have a longing that I might become able to forgive, and in time able to truly exercise that ability.

My concern, however, is not dependent upon my being able to forgive, nor on any feeling of forgiveness.

I am so far removed from the person in question, and from every aspect of the news I received, that my sense of forgiveness or otherwise has no bearing on the situation other than in my own mind.

What does have a bearing on all of this, for me, is that soon after life-changing events that occurred on and around 17th January twenty years ago, I first found myself wondering what it might be that I was being called to do. I still have my scribbled notes made at the time, clearly showing that my thoughts have been remembered correctly. Two possibilities in particular were highlighted, for reasons that were more obvious to me then than they are now. The one was working with Travellers, almost certainly in Ireland.

The other was working in some way to help struggling priests: to assist in the provision of support for those in need but for whom, for themselves, there may appear to be no such prospect. 

Suddenly, those same possibilities had been placed before me again; each of those whose leaving had troubled me so much was either a Traveller or a priest. And all three have always had and still have so much to offer.

Wherever he may now be, I pray that the one about whom I received word last Tuesday has a reliably safe haven in which to dwell. I doubt that taking to the road again will suit his declining years; and he has too much that is good within him for it to be allowed to fade away in isolation.

But I am incapacitated. I can do nothing but place him, and all who have been in any way involved or otherwise disturbed by what they have heard, into God’s own hands.   There is no other place where judgment, justice, forgiveness, truth and peace can be adequately weighed and distributed, retained or forgotten.

My own confusion has already been laid out at His feet.   I must make no move to take it up again.

‘Then he betook himself into the vast deserts ...’

(The life of Saint Antony - ascribed to Athanasius. Breviary: 17th January)

God is present

 ‘I lift up my eyes to the mountains;

where is my help to come from?’

(Psalm 121:1)

Those words have long been entwined in my thoughts and experiences of hills and mountains; entwined in such a way that the answer runs through me even before the words of the question surface into consciousness. They always speak, not of some far off vantage point, whether remembered or merely imagined, but of the particular place in which I find myself at that moment. Both question and answer surround me and settle as an omnipresent cloak spreading over every piece of un-peopled high ground I have ever seen. At each such moment, those words could have been written for the heights to which my eyes have been raised, or upon which I stand.

So it was for the beautifully forested Pyrenean mountainsides among which I spent time as summer gave way to autumn. As soon as I first set foot on the steep path leading up through the wooded shadows behind the house in which I stayed, all views of the mountains disappeared and I was enveloped in one of those frequent and impossible to brush aside invitations that call me to acknowledge the presence of something far greater than mere coincidence; something beckoning me away from the superficial, the momentary and the false, to an absorption into the profound, the enduring and the true.

I had packed one unnecessary item before leaving home. I brought it to enable my expected answer to be an honest one when asked if I had packed a book among the other so-called “essentials”.  In any such place, the woods, the streams and the hills are the only ‘book’ I need. They are filled not only with pages, but many lines to every page, and with every word pointing to truths written between those lines.

Words and meanings, and awareness of truths beyond all words, calling ever deeper and ever higher along the paths and gullies and ridges, while echoes of the well known words which greet me on stepping through my own door run through me – “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.”

I did, however, read the first page of the preface of the book, and it provided me with words to lean against my awareness of God’s unbidden presence; they stood as book-ends between which I later gathered my own experiences while staying there.

‘Every sound (is) a voice, every scrape or blunder (is) a meeting – with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly.  ... Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures ...’  (The Spell of the Sensuous. David Abram.)

I, and those with me, were blessed in remarkable ways during our forest and mountain walks, but one hour in particular left us almost speechless. It was a previously unimaginable experience conjured from the natural world around us, manifested for us, and carrying a message to us – to one of us in particular, I believe. I gave no details of it in the visitors’ book where we stayed; it did not belong there, just as it does not belong here; but what I did feel compelled to leave was an expression of my hope that others will search beyond the superficial attractions around them; that they will go deep. The truth awaits anyone visiting those peaks and forests, and it longs to provide visitors with their own intimate experiences of relationship within it.

In being drawn to raise their own eyes to those hills about them, may they also find the answer to that same question; and may their time there be spent – as mine had been – in wonder, and in peace.

And may anyone reading this be led to listen for the voice which whispers to each one of us.

Be still; be quiet; be content and at peace; partake of the banquet of words to be read and heard in the streams, the trees, the mosses, the trails of mist and cloud, all tumbling down as music, rolling across and caressing the hillsides with overflowing truth.

‘My help comes from The Lord who made heaven and earth.’

 (Psalm 121:2)

To each her own

Having had my interest stirred by the article in which I found Micah’s words repeated so soon after they had spoken to me – stirred more deeply, perhaps, than might otherwise have been the case – I allowed myself to wander along the paths that led away from reading through it. Each path meandered in and out of secluded areas and back into a central, bright and open space; much like walking round my own garden. Though each path’s train of thought was different, they were connected, and the whole experience was self-contained and complete: another of the small, slow-turning, recallable circles held within the gently rising spirals of my walk through this life.

One sequence of thoughts became the previous post. Looking back to it now, I realize the obvious: that those thoughts were entirely my own, and may be far from whatever the actual experience was for the writer of the article. But my thoughts had the writer – a person known to me – as their background, and memories of previous occasions when we have been involved in something together, as well as the many Sunday Mass encounters over the years, returned to mingle with the thoughts that had come from her words:  ‘As I walked home ... I felt inspired by the young people and remembered ...’

This path led me to more focussed thinking about her than at any previous time, though never fully occupying my train of thought as her presence in my mind was as a form of reflector; I cannot call it a mirror, as it enabled me to see more clearly that in one essential way she and I are completely different. This is no surprise to me. I have often thought it to be so.

For years, she has been doing essential work within the parish: work she would not be able to do well if she was not the person she is. 
I, on the other hand, have always been aware that I could not do what she does. I could put on a convincing front for a time (though only if I really could not get out of it), but if I had no alternative but to maintain it beyond a certain point, I am sure I would fall apart: I would disintegrate in one way or another. She is at the centre of parish life, and must not only be able to cope with it, but must revel in it if she is to remain as the readily available, helpful and happy face people expect to find when meeting her.

I am at the edge of most things, and that is where I seem to be most comfortable. I am not out of things altogether, though it does feel like that at times. Such feelings are countered, however, by the opposite and more discomforting feelings that accompany my involvement in those tasks which do occasionally bring me close to the centre of things.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses; we each have our place in the overall scheme of things. It does me a great deal of good to see so clearly that someone so much more gregarious than myself is in precisely the place where we all need her to be. But it is more than just the type of person; it is the individual. The right person called to a particular time and place, and responding positively to that call.

I thank God for calling her; and I thank her for having said “Yes”.

Another path allowed me to catch glimpses of a particular area of interest that had figured large in my earlier life but which had begun to slip away with the arrival of adult responsibilities: family, mortgage, and the need to maintain continuous employment. The interest had never died away completely, until I met someone whose expertise was centred on that same part of the world; albeit applied in an entirely different field. Our paths were meant to cross, but, contrary to my expectations, a revival of my dormant interest was not what God had in store for me. Whether all subsequent avoidance of my attraction to joining a parish group with a loose connection with that interest was also meant to be, or due to other ongoing uncertainties, is still unknown. What I now regard as certain, however, is that I shall never visit the one part of the world to which I had always longed to go. The idea of doing so no longer figures in any part of my thinking, nor in my dreams.

And yet another path leads off, again, from Micah’s words: “to act justly, to love tenderly”.

As I see the world from that path, I am aware that to be capable of following those two requirements fully, and at all times, would be to approach human perfection. Walking humbly with God would be a natural and inevitable consequence of acting justly and loving tenderly: of acting and loving as Jesus acted and loved; of acting and loving only as the Father willed Jesus to act and love, and as He would have us do likewise, guided and directed by The Holy Spirit. The Trinity is revolving around and within my thinking as the path brings me back to the light in the open space at the centre of the garden, though I cannot quite define what I mean by those words; nor shall I try to grasp their meaning, as it is simply there, and here, and not in any need of definition.

To think and feel and pray as Jesus did, would make it impossible to act and love in any way contrary to the Father’s will; and it would make humility so complete, so natural, and so normal that it would exist only as an unnecessary word: an unwritten, unspoken, unheard, and un-thought-of synonym for ‘being’.

Humility, as a concept, exists only because of our pride and arrogance. Hubris annihilates every chance of approaching perfection.

‘Whatever you undertake will go well, and light will shine on your path;

for he casts down the pride of the arrogant, but he saves those of downcast eyes.’

(Job 22:28-29)

Bringing it home

Recently, Micah 6:8 presented itself to me again; on the first page that opened when I picked up my local parish magazine. The full sentence reads: ‘As I walked home that evening I felt inspired by the young people and remembered the line from Micah: “This is what God asks of you, only this, to act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God”.’

The writer had been reminded of a bible verse, and perhaps its words were made more meaningful, more relevant, more real, by the evening’s experiences. The thoughts and words, actions and reactions: the underlying attitudes of the young people with whom she, and others, had spent the evening, had struck a chord in her, and had fed her in a way that brought her back to God’s word. Such moments are very much part of the ‘The word of God’ being ‘something alive and active’.

God’s Word has to be heard or read before it can make any impression on us; and our deeper immersion in it, and our savouring of it, embeds it in our ways of thinking and being as well as in our memory. But even after a merely superficial reading, and even long after, it can return to us in a striking way when something of which it speaks either triggers our memory, thus enabling a new and powerful link to be made, or it makes the link for us first, allowing us to draw the Word from our memory and to bring it to life in the context of our own lives. In such ways, an event, such as that evening, does not remain as a moment in time, or a period with a clear start and finish, but forms a recurring loop: a small circle which can be returned to and rejoined at any point, with immediate access to the whole circle of moments, words, connections, inspirations, and memories which are nourishing each other with an interconnected life of their own. Something is brought home to us in a way that goes beyond the product of our meditations; it is poured into us as though as a form of contemplative awareness, without the futility of contrived attempts at contemplation in any of its imitated, strived for, or managed forms.

Within that single written sentence; within that circle, completed when the evening brought the writer home to scriptural words enfolding the experience into a meaningful whole, I find three other circles of meaning: three pirouettes, as it were, experienced during the longer sweep of the whole evening’s loop, which itself may now be a stage in the spiral of her ongoing spiritual journey.

‘As I walked ...’  She walked, but it was not a simple one way walk to her home; it was the completion of her evening’s journey. She had set out from home on a form of pilgrimage, possibly remaining unaware of the potential until almost back at her own door. She had set out, experienced and been touched by something at the place to which her steps had taken her, and had completed the circle by bringing the experience home with her: ‘As I walked home ...’

No pilgrimage is over when the apparent destination has been reached; the true end-point is the place from which we set out. We have to return home; and for the pilgrimage to have been worthwhile, we must bring home whatever we have gained, learned, or had revealed to us. But it does not stop there.

‘As I walked home that evening I felt inspired ...’ The inspiration would have been building throughout the evening, but the moment by moment experiencing of it had left it unrecognized until a peaceful reflection during the quiet walk home completed the circle.

‘As I walked home that evening I felt inspired by the young people ...’ Inspiration is frequently felt deeply when it is brought about through the words, actions, and commitment of young Christians. They are the future of the Church: the future of Christianity, whether in the institutional structures with which greying congregations are so familiar, or in the far looser potential of whatever it is toward which The Holy Spirit is leading them. They are the future of our own faith, and it is good to see it alive and playing a part in the lives of those who will carry it after we have gone. 

The sequence is finally rounded off by their inspiration drawing God’s Word up from the well of memory, and allowing its living water to flow freely once more.  ‘As I walked home that evening I felt inspired by the young people and remembered ...’

(These thoughts have stirred my own memory of another open page.  See 24.05.08  ‘Moments’. )

Laurie Lee entitled part of his autobiography, ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’. He was setting out on a journey, unaware of what might lie ahead. The writer of the parish magazine article had come full circle, and had found food for thought; food, perhaps, for the next steps on her lifelong journey. For her, it was not the setting out that had touched her; she had moved into a place where both those with whom she had spent the evening, and the Word, had spoken into her heart. That place: that peace: that Presence, had come to her as she stepped her own way into it – ‘As She Walked Home One Winter Evening’.

“Children, our love must be not just words or mere talk,

but something active and genuine.”

(1 John 3:18)

Feeling the Word

Even today, and especially today, throughout the multiplicity of separated groups within the broad reach of the Christian Church, we have our own ongoing and self-perpetuating derivative of Babel. We have all played a part in the process that has spawned the fragmentation and dilution of our understanding of the Word of God.

Any admission, even secret and unspoken, of anything even vaguely resembling those thoughts can discomfort us in a way that threatens to hurt if we dwell on it. It stirs something very deep within us: something that brings distraction, and an indefinable awareness that, however rarely we may open a Bible, or give any thought to scripture other than hearing the readings at Sunday mass, we really do value whatever is written between the covers of that solid body of a book.

The confusion lies with the many translations available, though many of us will be untroubled by this availability as it does not translate into a consciousness of there being a choice involved. If we have a Bible of our own, we can truthfully declare that we possess a copy of the Bible; and what more is needed? – Whether we open it or not. But if the Bible contains the Word of God, and if, as everyone hears so often, many Christians believe every word written there, then in every verse where translations differ, which particular words are the correct translation? Which words accurately convey the Word of God? Which words are God’s words? What, and where, is God’s Word?

I do not usually give much thought to these questions, as I am aware that time spent with them would be better spent elsewhere: – reading my own Bible perhaps? The one I am used to; the same one that others around me use; the one that I have come to regard quite simply as “The Bible”: The New Jerusalem Bible. Other Christians, from other denominations and churches, will think along the same lines, but their solid book will not contain the same translation as the one I use. Any attempted discussion would probably carry us towards a defence of our own particular volumes, and that, in its turn, will only lead us into the blind alleys of fruitless disagreement and fractious discontent – the thorny ground in which many translations have already been seeded and germinated.

Someone gave me their email address a few days ago; writing it on a card which had a scripture verse printed large on one side of it. I looked at the photograph on the other side but, unlike the words of that verse, it carried no message for me. I read it as though it spoke directly to me as an individual, and found myself wondering if that card just happened to be the first suitable thing that came to hand when looking for something to write on, or whether it had been recognized earlier as having some relevance for me, and therefore carried for the sole purpose of passing it to me. Almost certainly it was the former.

I looked up the verse in my own Bible later, as that is the one I use on these pages; but having done so I had to reject it in favour of the words I had read on the card. I believe they were taken from the New King James Version; they were the ones that spoke to me. 

‘He has shown you, O man, what is good;

And what does the Lord require of you

But to do justly,

To love mercy,

And to walk humbly with your God?’

(Micah 6:8)

For me, on that day, the Word of God was recognized in the above wording: in that translation rather than the one I always use for myself. The last few words are the same in both, for which I was thankful, as they tell me to continue with my solitary walk, my waiting, and my watching with my Lord, without any thought of needing to do anything more specific. But the ‘O man’ was received as being aimed directly at me as I read: a twist that would not have been possible with my own Bible’s version.

Intimations of Babel echoing through the ages came with my finding that in my own Bible, ‘To love mercy’ – which I love – was rendered as ‘to love loyalty’.

Am I alone in having difficulty in accepting that they are one and the same? – that they both convey the same meaning?  Which do I take as being the better, and hopefully correct translation? Which is the Word of God?

Objectively, I am in no position to know the answer, and to pretend that I do, based on my habitual preference for the Bible I have used for years, is not helpful. Subjectively, however, I know what I am meant to know; that on that day, with my thoughts and feelings at the time, and with the person and the means chosen to bring those words to me, God’s Word for me came in the particular words printed on that card.

That is the reality of The Word; it is not a lifeless book of words, phrases and sentences; dead verses, chapters, stories and letters. It speaks to us collectively as the Church, but it is forever speaking to us individually and personally: – subjectively.

Reading it is not enough; we must learn to feel it. God has ever longed for us to understand that it is so.

‘The word of God is something alive and active:

it cuts more incisively than any two-edged sword:

it can seek out the place where soul is divided from spirit, or joints from marrow;

it can pass judgement on secret emotions and thoughts.’

(Hebrews 4:12)

Food and drink

However determined we may be when we close our doors, when we make conscious decisions to shut ourselves in or to shut everyone and everything else out, we rarely manage to isolate ourselves completely for long. For some it may be a matter of hours only, for others a few days; some of us may manage it for a few weeks at a time, but even that is not long when seen from an external viewpoint.

Our presence in our local community seeps out almost unnoticed through modern communications and our continuing needs for at least some of the essentials for normal everyday living. The one overriding need for each one of us is an absolute necessity for life: the need for food and drink.

Whether our closed door is the physical reality of a garden gate, the door to our house or flat, or, if we are living at home with our parents or in somebody else’s home, the door to our own room; or whether it is a purely internal barrier: a mental closing of curtains, bringing down of a blind, securing of shutters, or closing and locking of a door on whatever psychological or emotional disturbance we are trying to deny, bury, counter, or overcome, the barrier we use to separate us from the undeniable reality of the rest of the world can never be completely sealed. Just as our presence will leak out through an occasional use of today’s means of communication and through the essential answering of some of our physical needs, so also, that which we are trying to avoid will find a way of seeping in.

The process could be regarded as a form of osmosis: an equalizing of all that was created equal, and an underlying tendency to reposition every part of creation where it was meant to be. We are part of the world, and have not been created to live outside it; either in an attempt to survive beyond its influence, or shut away in a sealed cell, even in the midst of it.

This is equally true, if not more so, of our spiritual lives. We are part of God’s creation, and as such we do not have an external view of what goes on in the world, of human nature and of its susceptibility to being influenced by both good and evil,  health and sickness, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, love and hate, life and death. We are part of it; and everything within it: both sides of every conceivable coin, is, or is potentially, part of us. Just as our physical life is unalterably tied in with all other life on the planet, and will strive to stay in balance with it: equalizing the pressures on both sides of our doors in a lifelong attempt to maintain today’s take on the evolutionary and ever refining status quo, so too are we created to become aware of our spiritual nature, and to be drawn towards the spiritual realities that permeate the whole of the world around us. Whatever we believe, feel and think, it is not possible for any of us to shut God out, or to hide ourselves from Him.     

‘For I am certain of this:

neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,

nothing already in existence and nothing still to come,

nor any power, nor the heights nor the depths,

nor any created thing whatever,

will be able to come between us and the love of God,

known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

(Romans 8:38-39)

    

From our own point of view, a door may serve only one of those purposes: either to shut ourselves in or to shut everything else out; but the net result is the same in either case: the degree of separation is the same, and so too, inevitably, is the degree of consequent isolation. Whatever our thinking and reasoning, we are either afraid to venture out into all that the world has to offer, good and bad, or we fear being invaded and overwhelmed by it if we allow it into our lives. We cannot benefit from all the goodness, inspiration and strength made available to us if we shelter (hide?) or protect (barricade?) ourselves behind a closed door. “There is so much blessing and beauty near us which is destined for us, and yet it cannot enter our lives, because we are not ready to receive it. The handle is on the inside of the door; only we can open it.”   (John O’Donohue. Anam Cara.) 

                

But the Spirit of God reaches in to us, however deeply buried we may be, and in calling us, and touching us, He brings us to a point at which we may allow ourselves to be grasped, and gently drawn out into the hands of the Living God.

The gently glowing, barely recognized fire which had been lit within us could not have been started if we had never stepped beyond the boundaries within which we now attempt to confine ourselves. The kindling has been dried out during our remote and anonymous waiting, but we had to have gone beyond our present limits at some time in the past to gather those small pieces of fuel. Like Ruth in Boaz’s fields, we had to venture out to glean what we could, and in so doing we placed ourselves where we could be led by stages into a greater abundance of the very things for which we are still searching: food, and drink, and life itself.

‘So she set out and went to glean in the fields behind the reapers. ... Boaz said to Ruth, ‘... You must not go gleaning in any other field. You must not go away from here. Stay close to my work-women. Keep your eyes on whatever part of the field they are reaping and follow behind. ... And if you are thirsty, go to the pitchers and drink what the servants have drawn.'... Boaz gave orders to his work-people, 'Let her glean among the sheaves themselves. ... And be sure you pull a few ears of corn out of the bundles and drop them. Let her glean them ...' He also said, "Stay with my work-people until they have finished my whole harvest." ' (Ruth 2:3, 8-9, 15-16, 21.)

We fetch and carry the kindling to store within ourselves, but we do not carry the flame to light it until we welcome it into our lives; and the lit fire will begin to flicker and flame only when fanned by the breath of the Spirit carried to us in the presence of others: persons guided into our path by that same Spirit, but with whom we can have no meaningful contact without either stepping out into the world, or allowing them to approach us more closely than may at first feel possible.  

We have neither the time nor the energy to maintain the attempted separations we contrive for ourselves. There are other doors on which our attention should be focussed; doors which we alone do not have the power to open and close. We need our fellow travellers: the two or three, or more, who will meet in His name and bring us into the abundance of His blessings, ready and waiting in the world beyond our fears.

One way or another, if we have responded to God’s call, He will reveal Himself in the presence of others and at the very core of our being.

‘It is God who, for his own generous purpose, gives you the intention and the powers to act.’

(Philippians 2:13)

Liminal fortitude? 8

‘We must free ourselves absolutely of this anxious desire to be at one with other souls, however virtuous or wise they may be; just as we must never expect them to see things through our eyes. We must follow our own light as though we were alone in the world, save as regards charity to others. In purely private matters, we must never be deflected from our own path.’

(Abbé de Tourville. Letters of Direction.)

 I know I have not reached the end of my unravelling process, but the various strands are now lying in loose bundles with no tight knots to be seen. I have returned to a more relaxed and receptive state of peace, if not what I would recognize as tranquillity. But I must tread warily. Nothing has changed apart from the way I feel, and that, alone, must not be taken as counting for much. I find myself perched giddily, but not necessarily precariously, right at the very edge of things again. My options have been brought more clearly into focus, and yet they are essentially exactly the same as a few weeks ago. I either decide to follow the leading with which I have been struggling, or I do not. Taking a final decision will change things; that is inevitable. But changes brought about by making the decision will have no worthwhile outcome unless the decision is followed through; and in that fact lies the potential for a continuation of the turmoil that is preventing me from getting off the road and safely away from that which may eventually flatten me. Like the rabbit, I am still in the wrong place, and sometime soon the traffic lights at the edge of town are going to change to green again.

If I decide not to follow: not to risk losing the hope of that for which I hope, all I have to do is dismiss all these thoughts, delete all these words, and not print and send, or post any of this in my usual place at The Very Edge, or anywhere else. Easy! – until I come to act on the decision. I can destroy all that I have written, but does that move me on if I am unable to shed all that remains within me? – all that led to the writing in the first place? Such questions take me right back to a time when Prudence told me she could not help thinking that my writing, about whatever was going on within me at the time, was not helping: that it was aggravating and perpetuating the problem I was trying to resolve. If she knew what I was doing now, I know what her advice would be; and I know she would be right. In fact, that thought itself has immediately helped me. (Your past provision still retains power in me. Thank you Lord.)

If I imagine that she was fully aware of my feelings and leadings, my hopes and fears, and all that is written here, and that I was talking about it with her now, I know that I would follow her advice. She would tell me that the written words still do not matter (and that I should not have started on them). What I should have done at the beginning, and what I should still do, as soon as the opportunity arises, is open my mouth and say to the people involved, whatever it is that I need to say. The trouble is (how do I dare still think those words?), that having imagined that powerfully helpful conversation, I also hear her saying, “What are you afraid of? You know Wisdom and Hope; how can you fear anything from them?”, and then, as she asks, “What’s troubling you?”, I am back at the start, having been reminded that I just don’t know!

Unless, as was in my mind when I included verses from Ephesians 6 somewhere in these posts, - unless I am being restrained by something which really does want to nail my feet to the ground: something which will do whatever it can to prevent me walking along whatever path I am meant to follow: something which has already succeeded, not least by tying me in knots, and keeping me occupied by trying to write myself out of my bindings.

Perhaps those thoughts alone are enough to tell me that while I should follow the course Prudence would have set for me, I should also go ahead with posting all of this now that it is written – not only for what it might speak back to me at some time in the future, but as a form of armour against the silencing that could otherwise claim another small victory if I did not give some sort of voice to these thoughts and feelings.

If I am involved in a battle of some sort, other than with myself, then this too must point to the correctness of any honest approach I make towards the door that Hope appears to have opened for me.

All my past thoughts on companionship, fellowship, being part of something, and needing each other, together with my awareness that I have not always followed my own advice, are placed here, along with a readiness, and a fortitude which is ready to break away from its self-doubting, and from its liminal flat-lining in a confrontation with whatever spiritual enemy dares to challenge me. They are placed here, between two quotes from the Abbé de Tourville’s ‘ Letters of Direction’, which may seem, to some, as diluting the value and the necessity of any call to fellowship and community, but which, for me, are significant reminders both of where I have been for many years, and of where I am also meant to be.

I am well-schooled in standing alone, and perhaps because of it, I can find it difficult to step into the very welcome that I hope for. But the two are not meant to be exclusive; we are called to be at home in both, with each giving us elements of our spiritual life which cannot be gleaned from the other. We bring from each to enrich our understanding and effectiveness when in the other. If we fail to do so, then we shall inevitably remain ‘profoundly incomplete’.

When next I find myself writing here, I hope I shall have moved on in some way: in whatever way God wills. I shall post all that I have written, and, however briefly and sketchily, I shall do my best to speak directly to Hope or Wisdom. My start-point will have to be a more complete answer to the probing question from weeks ago. But this whole experience has raised one other concern which also involves my speaking openly. They do not know about my writing here, and will therefore not know that these words exist. I know of only two local people who know both me and my ‘blogging self’, and they are not members of our parish. I have always said that if people find me here by chance and tell others, then so be it; but I have always wanted to remain unknown and of no consequence for the reasons given in my profile. I now find my original intentions under threat, and I am already finding it difficult to justify keeping to myself these written words which are irreversibly associated with Hope and Wisdom. I have let others know when I have referred to them here, and I know that I should now tell them. Avoiding that decision altogether by not posting this, is to turn down the chance of donning some of the armour provided, and would place me right back into the hands of the same restraining powers.

I suppose I could sheepishly revert to my original intention, which had been to write to them, using all this as a less personal form of the letter I failed to complete and never sent. Perhaps I shall hurdle more than one of my barriers by simply giving them a link to these pages, hopefully with a little more than a passing, “I don’t know if you might be interested, but ...” 

 I am uncomfortable with not knowing where that might lead me.

Why did I suggest hurdling? At my age any such attempt would undoubtedly result in me falling flat on my face; but then, in the company of the right people (as Prudence taught me) that need not be a fearful thought.

‘We must never allow ourselves to believe that our soul is linked to any other soul in such a way that we rely solely on that external influence, on a direction external to ourselves. God wants to teach us to stand alone, without having to lean too heavily even on the instruments He provides. ... He teaches us by a series of intermediaries all of whom are transitory and all of whom, when considered separately, are profoundly incomplete.’ (Abbé de Tourville. Letters of Direction.)

Liminal fortitude? 7

Our waiting, our staying awake, and our watching, are not to be confined to whatever limited space and time we may allocate to it. Maundy Thursday highlighted that fact for me. A clearly defined period in which to “watch” with Jesus, in a church, is a thoughtful as well as comfortable way to approach the edges of the reality behind our commemoration of that day, but the urgency of my wish to be part of it slips further away with each year. Particularly on a warm and still night like the one we then passed through, it takes little more than a moment to enter into the emptiness and the pain, as well as the beauty of Gethsemane. All it takes is a decision to allow one’s inner awareness to surface through all the usual boundaries while out in the quiet solitude of the fresh night air. It is not necessary to be up on the hills, though that is where I would have liked to have been; just out, among trees, or even close to a single tree, in one’s own garden.

All that happened on that original Thursday night, cannot be separated from the fact that the root of Christian fellowship began its journey towards potential oblivion in a form of Eden: in a quiet seclusion, outside, between earth and open sky; in a place where all doors to God’s presence were open, but where those who could have spent time with Him failed to stay awake. They experienced the apparent non-existence of a mere moment in sleep, when they could have been consciously waiting and watching, bathing in eternity’s shallows (the gift we receive, and are asked to give back, as time), and gradually being drawn into the eternal miracle of a timeless and total immersion in His Presence: of being with Him.

The “when” of things has been a barely discernible part of my experience during the last twenty years. I have not been aware of anything resulting from my own sense of timing during that period, for I have not been conscious of having any such sense; at least that is how my waiting has seemed. I have spent much of that time feeling as though I was that startled and confused rabbit: motionless, in danger, not knowing which way to run, and unable to make a decision for fear of getting it wrong. Perhaps what has brought me this far, is that in having no real timing of my own, I have been prevented from seriously mistiming whatever I may have done. I have spent all those years waiting, and what has often disturbed me greatly has been my continuing lack of knowledge as to what it is that I am waiting for; what I am meant to be doing; where I am meant to be going. But whenever I have started to formulate ideas, they have occupied me for a while and then faded to nothing, leaving me with a feeling that they had been mere distractions from the path I was being asked to follow. Yet that path seemed to lead endlessly on, taking me nowhere; and with nothing new to grasp along the way, I found past experiences, people and places becoming even more firmly embedded in my limited catalogue of meaningful and trusted friends.

I have not been aware of passing through any particular doors along the way, and the only doors of which I have been conscious have always seemed closed to me. This has troubled me in waves that subside whenever I attempt to convince myself that they have been conjured from my imagination. They were doors I had wanted to find open to me, while suspecting that such doorways did not in fact exist. But now, in the last few weeks, I have found my unspoken longing being met by rays of hope that I may not have been as misguided as I had thought. I am now more inclined to believe that my continued waiting may have been the correct response to being asked to do just that: that I have in fact had an unrecognized ability to sense that I have not been called upon to do anything other than to wait, to stay awake, and to watch with my unseen companion, not on Maundy Thursday night only, but every night and day, and with every step that I take.

As my thoughts slowly turned themselves into a form of words, I came to recognize what may have been obvious to anyone able to view the situation from beyond its apparent boundaries. If I had remained at the very edge of it I would have been able to see it for myself long ago, but the whole nature and structure of the situation has caught me up into thinking far too much about myself, instead of doing what I have so often told myself to do: to wait, and to carry on waiting until such time as I am told to do something else.

What I have finally come to realize is that Hope and Wisdom feel that a door has closed in front of them, just as I have long thought one closed in front of me.

Might not that door be the same one? And leading on from that thought, if it is the same door, where are we in relation to each other? Are we standing together in front of it? If we are, are we being called to join forces for some reason? – to open the door together, or to search for another door which will lead us to where we are needed to be? This is the very possibility on which I have dwelt so many times. Or, are we standing on opposite sides of the same door? It would again appear that this door could be opened by our joint efforts, but from different directions. This image feels far more powerful to me, as though acknowledging that while we are travelling different paths and being called to different tasks, we are required to combine some aspects of our spiritual natures for the good of all. After so much time, could our closer fellowship, after all, be the answer to my long-running wordless prayer? – the opening of my closed door? And could their own closed door be opened as a result of my joining with them?

We need to have the eyes to see. Have mine been closed to what has been in front of me all the time? Could it really be that the door to that which I seek has been wide open for a long time? Could it even have been open to me all the time? Have I really been that blind? Or has the whole self-conscious delay been the product of my fear? 

Yet again, I am brought back to those same few lines from John Henry Newman; but this time they really do ring through my heart as an accusation rather than as a less troubling pricking of my conscience.

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

Yet still I do not speak out, other than in half-truths. My longing is hidden: kept concealed, or at least disguised so as not to risk the door which I long to find truly open to me, being firmly closed. It has felt as though a door has blown off in an aircraft at altitude, with a sensation of being irresistibly drawn towards the opening, and, if I allowed myself to be so drawn, being taken straight through it to freefall to a landing place which cannot be anticipated or pre-selected.

I still have not dared to take the risk; and yet I know that my one and only opportunity may be short-lived. I may hesitate too long, even while fearing that the door may close before me. But I also hear another voice ...

‘You are in communion with God and with those whom God has sent you. 

What is of God will last.’

(Henri Nouwen. The Inner Voice of Love.)

Liminal fortitude? 6

Whenever I think of Wisdom, the first image that has always come to mind is an open door. I am sure that most people would agree that this is an appropriate image for her anyway, but mine is deeply embedded for other reasons.

Long ago, she sent me a card with one, and with Revelation 3:8 quoted inside: “Look, I have opened in front of you a door that no one will be able to close”. That card is still a frequently seen reminder of the first time I met her: a meeting which became one of the permanent anchor points along my path. The door towards which she was the first to point me has never closed.

Until Holy Week, when these particular thoughts were coming to me, I had always thought that she had opened that door for me; that she had, so to speak, been the gatekeeper who had pointed the way and encouraged me to move towards the opened door. I did not know her, and we spoke only briefly, but her few words during those fleeting moments, were the subtle trigger that began a process which put all that had gone before into a context that soon became the bedrock of the only life I know.

As I was writing to her, and Hope, on Maundy Thursday (the unsent letter), it dawned on me that while she had indeed been a gatekeeper, positioned at the right time and place to meet me on my unsuspecting arrival, she had put me at ease as I drew closer to a door which had already been opened. It had been opened by the One who caused her to pause when I was passing; to greet me and enquire of me, that I too may pause instead of wandering straight past. I had thought she had opened the door because it seemed almost that it was her own door; she had been so comfortable beside it. And it seemed clear that she was equally at home beyond it as she was where she stood, talking to me; even that she belonged on the other side of it, and had merely come visiting for a while. Perhaps what lay beyond the door was her true home? That would explain why I had never even noticed another door: the one she really did open for me, and through which I had unknowingly stepped as soon as I responded to her greeting.

These thoughts took me straight to John 18: to the door into the high priest’s palace, where another woman was on duty as gatekeeper, and where Peter, who could have gone straight through with “the other disciple” chose to stay outside the door. Why he did not take the opportunity when it first arose is not relevant here (though his turmoil may have some relevance for me), but it did get me thinking about the existence of other doors: doors other than the one “that no one will be able to close”.
That those words were spoken and written now implies – no, it makes clear – for me, that all other doors can be closed. It is equally clear, however, that we cannot deduce from that, that all other doors can be opened.

Peter held back when the door before him was open, and missed that first opportunity. At the same time, he wanted to go through; why else would he have waited just outside the closed door?

The expression “to shut the door on” something can be used in many ways, broadly splitting into two groups. Someone else can shut the door on us; on our opportunities and our potential: on any aspect of our presence, our activity, or our influence. But there are just as many in the other group; those which involve our own decisions and our own shutting of a door. We shut out other people, and aspects of the world we wish to exclude from our lives and even from our consciousness; and from our conscience. Others can shut us out, but we are equally capable of shutting them out, along with whatever we do not wish to be part of, cannot face, or are too afraid or ashamed to confront.

We can be caught unawares if waiting close to doors over which we have no control, whether open or closed; and if we are right beside them, we can find ourselves in danger of falling through to where we do not want to be. We have only to think of the warnings on the London underground.

There are wide open doorways allowing free access to and from the lounges and dining areas at the home where Hope and I had our conversation, but, as Ella had demonstrated, we may not always find a doorway easy to locate, however wide the access may be. We need to have the eyes to see. We may be confident that we can see clearly and that we know where to look, but what chance do we really have of finding the way out, or the way in, when the doorway is not so wide? Finding it, as well as walking through it, can be like passing the sealed book around; I can’t read, and the person next to me can’t open it because it is sealed. And the majority of those in the room with us, whether they can open the book and read or not, will make no move until they are led by someone else who knows the way, or even by a blind person who encouragingly and confidently, but falsely, proclaims that they can find the way for us. And lying blanket-like over all other layers, is the fact that, in reality, we each have to find the way for ourselves. Finding ourselves in front of a door, closed or open, means we have already found our way to it. Anyone there to help us, gatekeeper or not, is able to make contact with us only if and when we have turned up; but would we be able to trust in their help if they told us we were approaching the wrong door?

“Try your hardest to enter by the narrow door, because, I tell you, many will try to enter and will not succeed” (Luke 13:24).

We fail through none other than our own fault; and not only through our lacking the eyes to see. “The narrow door” is easily missed, not only because without knowing what we are looking for and persevering in our search, its narrowness makes it hard to see, but because it cannot necessarily be taken to be the “door that no one will be able to close”. It may be one which seems to be permanently open, but which can close unexpectedly at any time; or it may suddenly be opened for us, only to close again soon afterwards (like the door into the high priest’s palace), giving us the opportunity to go through it, but withdrawing it if we spend too long holding ourselves back.

Our call to follow is not a call to abandon our individuality and to live passively as one of a flock of equally inactive and unthinking sheep. It is a call to follow Our Lord’s example: not only to do, but to see, to hear, to feel, to think, and to speak, that we may become able to do in the way that Jesus has shown us, and to accomplish all these things as the unique persons we have been born to become. Following that example involves learning, not only what to do and how to do it, but when to advance, when to stand one’s ground, and when to retreat; when to speak and when to remain silent; when to do and when not to do. Our attempts to duplicate Our Lord’s manner of living and of being become the following to which we are called, only when we have learned the importance of knowing the “when” of all things. He did only what His Father told Him to do, which means His example included doing all those right things at the appropriate time: at the right time.

There is a right time for each of us to walk through open doors (“I shall remain at Ephesus until Pentecost, for a very promising door is standing wide open to me…” (1 Cor. 16:8-9); “Those who were ready went in with him to the wedding hall and the door was closed” (Matthew 25: 10)); to wait beside closed doors (“Be like people waiting for their master to return from the wedding feast, ready to open the door as soon as he comes and knocks” (Luke 12:36); “Look, I am standing at the door, knocking. If one of you hears me calling and opens the door, I will come in to share a meal at that person's side” (Rev 3:20).); and to knock on closed doors (“knock, and the door will be opened to you” (Luke 11:9-10).).

Trying our “hardest to enter by the narrow door” means not just searching for it in space, but knocking on it once it has been found, and waiting beside it until the time is right; and that means God’s time, not ours; waiting for the narrow door to reveal itself in the passage of time: the narrow window of time and opportunity that brings God’s blessing on the efforts of all mature followers of Christ. “I tell you,” that without the discernment of God’s timing “many will try to enter and will not succeed”; and they will include even those who have found the door, and who are prepared to remain close by it, but for only a limited period of time.