Speaking out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why? – Because it does.
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Resurrection Day

Emmanuel

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

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

God's dream becomes the waking womb;
"I am" is echoed in all things,
And, in the silence,
Being sings its throbbing song
And trembles into life.
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Silent improbability: resurrection;
But in a thought, true life flutters
Into harmony with flesh and bone:
Grown onto rootstock of creation's own
Inexpressible fount of impossibility.

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

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

Assembled into light.

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© Paul Amphlett 2007

Good Friday

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Christ has died

Maundy Thursday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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St Patrick's Day

‘... Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly ...’

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(W. B. Yeats. Easter 1916.)

Passing through

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Single track

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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