Living Wittily

Wonder and Worship, Mystery and Meaning, Incarnation and Adoration

The etching is by Rogier Van der Weyden and is in the Louvre, one of the earliest 15th Century drawings by a Flemish Master. I have a print of this in my study. The delicacy and intensity of the gaze and the precise definition of the sketching contrasts with the sense of mystery, the artist's search for the ideal a creative metaphor for our own search for those glimpses of the love and grace of the God who comes to us in Word made flesh, and does so through the yes of a young woman. Beauty and courage, trust and risk, Divine calling and human scandal, confident angelic annunciation and free human assent - so heaven and earth are brought together through the Gift of God and the generous receptive will of a woman, and the birth of a child.

The poem below comes from  an age which we in our sophisticated postmodern mindset might dare to call credulous - but it was also an age when the human capacity for wonder was a recognised way of knowing, and an essential element of wonder. I wonder where the wonder went?

Wit Wonders

A God and yet a man,

A maid and yet a mother:

Wit wonders what wit can

Conceive this or the other.

 

A God and can he die?

A dead man can he live?

What wit can well reply?

What reason reason give?

 

God, Truth itself doth teach it.

Man’s wit sinks too far under

By reason’s power to reach it:

Believe and leave to wonder.

(Anonymous – 15^th C)

Finding a Safe Place when We Are in a Hard Place

The Avowal, Denise Levertov

As swimmers dare

to lie face to the sky

and water bears them,

as hawks rest upon air

and air sustains them,

so would I learn to attain

freefall and float

into Creator Spirit's embrace

knowing no effort earns

that all-surrounding grace.

Learning to "attain freefall and float" is sometimes a big ask. It requires faith which sometimes comes hard. Such trust requires the courage to risk it all, which seems beyond us when the inner self is feeling defensive and self-protective. Somewhere in the emotional and spirtitual anatomy of faith there is the fusion of personal response and Divine Gift, or perhaps, personal response to Divine Gift. We are saved by grace through faith, which is the gift of God. Yet we are to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, while giving thanks that he who began a good work in us will bring it to completion.

It's an important pastoral insight, best learned by being pastorally sensitive to our own heart's longings, failures and fears, that being told to believe, to trust, to have faith, can be the hardest ask of all - and the hardest task of all. As well ask me to open a tin with a banana. In countless sermons, in many a praise song backed by enthusiastic singing, there can be a subtle but significant theological slippage that has far reaching spiritual consequences.

On what does my life depend? Where does faith come from? If it is all of grace, why does it seem so much depends on me believing, as if the flow of grace was through a tap I have to have the strength to turn on? And what if I don't have that strength?

Does my security depend on me holding on to God or God holding on to me?

Is it sinners receiving Christ or Christ receiving sinners that is of the esse of the Gospel.

Am I caught up into the Triune life of God, and held in the eternal security of a love that will not let me go, or does that depend on something I do, or give or think?

What I like about Levetov's lines, and why I quote them, is she understands (and later in her life came to understand with deep compassion born of her own suffering) is the last two lines.

Don't tell me to believe more. To trust more. To do this or that as if I wouldn't if I could, and if I knew what. To believe when my heart is wrung out of trust and I need to be held rather than take hold. Because it's that holding, that grace, that gift of Love Divine which as Julian says, enfolds us - it is that initiative of God, that perseverance, not of the saints but of God, whose untiring and inexhaustible grace as Levertov says bears, sustains and embraces, " and no effort earns that all-sustaining grace".

Just now and then in our lives, we come to the place where for all our uncertainties, we take the risk of saying to the God into whose life we are caught up in the love of the Father, the Grace of the Son and the communion of the Spirit, "Lord I believe - help my unbelief". The one reality that transcends thought and emotion, reason and the heart, and which persists as the truth that holds us even when we ourselves doubt it, is the spectacular assertion of Paul "Your life is hid with Christ in God".

We use the phrase a lot today, being 'in a hard place just now'. I guess we all know what it means. And that hard place can be a place where faith, trust, hopefulness, confidence, and courage require more than we are able to offer, just now. The hard place is the one that feels most real, determined by outer circumstance and inner anxiety. But the all sustaining grace perseveres, the untiring love does not weary, the life we live is surrounded and drawn into the eternal exchange of love and peace and joy - no we may not be aware of it, "our life is hid with Christ in God", and that depends not on my believing it, but on the love of Christ Crucified, the life of the Holy Spirit, and the sustaining mercy of the Father.

A Philosophical Theology of Prayer.

I don't enjoy many books about prayer. That doesn't mean there aren't any good ones, just that I'm not sure one ever helped me to pray more, or better. I'd rather have a book of prayers that have been composed, written and prayed in language rich with those human experiences out of which prayer erupts, or is dragged, or writes itself in word and emotion that is the human heart seeking encounter with the heart of God.

When a renowned philosopher whose works on Theism are mind stretchingly challenging decides to explore the basis of Christian prayer, then I don't expect another how to manual, nor another here's my experience, it was great and I'd like you to have it too bestseller. Which is good - because this book is quite different. Owen is unafraid of the theological and philosophical questions raised by our praying - telling God what God already knows, asking for what is in our own interests, establishing any causal connection between our praying and whatever happens that we perceive as an answer to prayer. The main thrust of the book is that prayer is best, perhaps only, understood, in the light of our doctrine of God and our theological conception of what a human being is, and what the relations between God and humanity are, should be and perhaps must be.

I learned so much from this book - The Basis of Christian Prayer, H P Owen (Regent College Pubblishing). Not about how to pray but about what prayer is, about the One to whom prayer is offered, and about the relational interchange that takes place between God and those who dare, and who desire, to address the God who first addresses us. "Prayer validates a personal, as against a non personal view of God. In prayer we address God as Thou." A page later (p.111) Owen quotes a most moving prayer of Anselm, from the Proslogion:

O God, I pray, let me know and love you

so that I may rejoice in you.

And if I cannot in this life fully,

let me advance day by day

until the point of fullness comes.

Let knowledge of you progress in me here,

and be made full there.

Let love for you grow in me here,

and be made full there,

so that here my joy may be great with expectancy

while there being full in realisation.

If there is such a thing as an eschatological spirituality, Then Anselm has gifted to the church a prayer that holds the Christian heart in that creative tension between now and then, here and there, Thou - and I.

Durer's Praying Hands (above) suffers from over-exposure on Christian kitsch products fro m wall plaques to plastic models. But in the original etching the artist combines beauty with beseeching, peace with tension, surrender and expectancy - and few images are more evocative of our humanity than our hands, with which we make and caress, hold and relinquish, clench and open, embrace or exclude. To lift up holy hands in prayer, is therefore no straightforward spiritual exercise.

Multum in Parvo (III) The priority of questions over answers

Always we find ourselves at the divergence

Of two paths travelling out.

Otherwise, our questions

Would already have been answered.

......................

Turning nightward in these domes

Our shutters opening like secrets

We set our silvered cups to catch

The fine mist of light

That settles from our chosen stars

On the edge of the unanswerable

Even here, our questions.

....................

These are two samples of poetry written by a brilliant astrophysicist whose field of research was 'dark matter'. Rebecca Elson wrote as an agnostic whose religious scepticism was tempered by imagination, compassion and a visionary hopefulness for humanity and for a future worthy of the beauty and potential of a universe shot through with mystery.

Reading her poetry and Journal entries is like encountering a 20th Century Qoheleth, questioning, enquiring, redolent of responsibility, capable of awe and wonder at the sheer intransigence of existence in the face of the human urge to mastery and comprehension.

Reading her poetry is to have your too easily and carelessly held assumptions about faith and life interogated by someone who was an Isaac Newton scholar at Cambridge, and interpreter of the Hubble data, a Harvard researcher, and a poet whose precision with words had more to do with nuanced meaning than technical skill.

Reading her poetry is like standing in a hot shower when someone turns on the tap downstairs and suddenly the water is freezing and there's no easy or quick escape from its jetted cold.

Accidentally praying - as if Someone meant it...

Come Holy Spirit, Spirit of Love, Spirit of Discipline,

In the silence

Come to us and bring us your peace;

Rest in us that we may be tranquil and still;

Speak to us as each heart needs to hear;

Reveal to us things hidden and things longed for;

Rejoice in us that we may praise and be glad;

Pray in us that we may be at one with you and with each other;

Refresh and renew us from your living springs of water;

Dwell in us now and always, Amen.

The prayer is by Father Robert Llewelyn one of the accomplished recent interpreters of Julian of Norwich, and it's taken from his book With Pity Not with Blame. From a well stocked shelf of studies on Julian, this slim book remains a favourite, especially as a guide to ways of praying that have less to do with words and more to do with inner orientation; acknowledging Presence, practising stillness, listening with the heart, gazing with the eyes of imaginagtive faith, and learning the necessary tensions between the mind thinking, the heart feeling and the will responding.

The other day I spoke with our College librarian, Dr Edward Burrows, about George Herbert and my fascination with three chosen people of genius - Julian, Herbert and Charles Wesley. Amongst their many gifts, I value their capacity to invest words with more than meaning, but with the power to communicate spiritual experiences with such penetrating integrity that they radically transform by sometimes evoking the very experiences they describe and expound. None of them use the idiom of contemporary-speak, and I guess it now requires an investment of time to learn their way with words, but to those who take the time, they may well discover the spiritual equivalent of treasure maps and the call to seek till they find.

There are others in my canon of spiritual geniuses - but those three - Julian, Herbert and Wesley, touch on a form of spirituality that for all their diversity, carries with it what C S Lewis called the scent of the far country.

As a matter of irrelevant coincidence (or unpremeditated purpose) I typed out the above prayer while listening to Albinoni's Adagio in G Major - and some of what the prayer asked just sort of happened, as if Someone meant it......

Haiku Prayer I : For those in peril on the sea.

Haiku Prayer I

Dangerous beauty:

Wild freedom of wind and waves,

O Lord have mercy

Kneeling in the dark, at the place where prayer is valid.

 As the rain hides the stars,

as the autumn mist hides the hills,

as the clouds veil the blue of the sky,

so the dark happenings of my lot

hide the shining of thy face from me.

Yet, if I may hold thy hand in the darkness,

it is enough. Since I know that,

though I may stumble in my going,

thou dost not fall.

(Celtic, unknown)

The dark night of the soul is an experience of stripping away the assurance of the senses. Disorientation, uncertainty, loss of impetus, mean that absence is more real than presence, and the unfamiliar displaces the familiar. A spirituality fixated on the positive, and in which dogmatic assurances silence those important murmurs of dissent, is for all its triumphalist note, a spirituality of denial. Not self-denial to be sure, but a more toxic form of refusal, a denial of that mysterious withdrawing of God's sensed presence by which we grow beyond adolescent claimfulness.

The above prayer doesn't express the classic experience of the dark night of the soul. The last line of it is reminiscent of Isaiah at his most pastorally poetic, and as the theologian who best describes the rhythm of feeling forsaken by the one who promises not to forsake.

This is a prayer that allows us to be both honest and modest about our experience of God. Honest enough to confess that sometimes God's presence is not felt; modest enough not to think our own sense of God or lack of sense of God makes any difference to the reality of things, that God remains actually present even in acutely felt absence.

"Though I may stumble in my going, thou dost not fall."

Since I know that, I know the most important thing.

And even if I am overcome at times

with doubt,

uncertainty,

and the pain of unknowing,

more important than what I know,

is that I am known,

and by whom I am known.

And one day I will know as I am known,

and see face to face

the radiant p[resence

of that greatest Love.

A Litlle Prayer for Samson and Delilah

Yesterday we were at the Westhill monthly book sale. It is held under the canopy of the shopping centre and there are loadsabooks! The money goes to support a local charity and the variety of books is astonishing, but there are also several genres heavily represented. One of the book sorters, displaying them in supermarket fruit boxes made no concessions to equality and diversity - there were "mens' book" and their were "womens' books". I asked him what defines a man's book - seems that's violence, thriller, military, and other accounts of mayhem. A woman's book is romance, nice story, life story of celebrities and other soft options.

I asked him then why the majority of readers of crime fiction are women, and some of the best crime authors likewise, women - including some of the darker forms of the genre. At which point I realised I was pushing too hard at his useful rule of thumb cataloguing technique by stereotype. I moved on.

Anyway, I bought two books having returned five and a CD for resale. (Net loss to our house of three books!) One of them is a book of poetry where I found this poem which is a brilliant example of biblical exposition that is imaginative, michievous, humorous and serious. There are a number of ways you can treat the story of Samson and Delilah. The weak strong man, the naive Judge who couldn't judge character, his own or Delilah's, the arrogance of strength and power. Then there's the Hollywood treatment of Victor Mature and Angela Lansbury as Delilah!

But this poem is quite different and I'm now wondering if the insight given could ever be preachable by a bald man!

 

Little Prayer for Samson and Delilah

When all virtue

like Samson's Rastafarian locks

lie strewn about us,

have mercy Lord,

on those who sleep in weakness,

and those who have shorn us of strength.

 

Like the growing stubble on Samson's head

let us be renewed to undertake

the phenomenal as a matter of course

when we awaken

from the lap of philistine ease.

(Diana Karay Tripp, 20th C, Lione Christian Poetry Collection, Mary Batchelor (ed), p.46.

The painting is by Gerritt Van Honthorst.

Carefully Considered and Patiently Crafted Prayers - The Gift of Reverence

O thou who art the light of the minds that know thee,

the life of the souls that love thee,

and the strength of the wills that serve thee;

help us to know thee that we may truly love thee,

and so to love thee that we may fully serve thee,

whom to serve is perfect freedom.

Amen    (Augustine of Hippo)

.....................

There are few more decisive arguments on behalf of careful, considered and beautifully crafted prayers than a prayer like this.

When all the valid arguments and reasons for extempore, unrehearsed, informal and immediate prayer are accepted, there is still an absolute necessity, when addressing God, to take care with the beauty of our language.

It reflects the care we take with the shaping of our thoughts and the sharing of our hearts.

And it reflects that essential courtesy that acknowledges the importance of the other by preparation, attention, attentiveness and the offering of that which has taken us some time and trouble.

 

 

The picture is of the rose I bought for Sheila last year - it too is a carefully crafted celebration of beauty, compliments of the Creator!

Seek the Lord while He may be found - Prayer of Bernard of Clairvaux

Omniscience is both a comforting and scary thought. God knows everything there is to know. Which means I can't hide anything - neither my sins nor my worries; my need for forgiveness nor for reassurance. 

It also means my motives which to me usually seem sound, but in reality are mixed and complex, are understood and seen with the scrutinising gaze of holy love.

But given God's omnisicience, I'm glad we pray to a God who is not slow on the uptake.

Just as well. Here's one of Bernard of Clairvaux's prayers. The kind of prayer even the Lord might ask should be said twice, just to be sure He got it the first time!

 

 

Lord, you are good to the soul that seeks you.

What are you then to the soul that finds?

But this is the most wonderful thing,

that no one can seek you who has not already found you.

You therefore seek to be found so that you might be sought for,

sought so that you may be found. Amen