Living Wittily

"The end of all is the grace unspeakable...and all manner of thing shall be well..."

"God made all things for love, by the same love keepeth them, and shall keep them without end." These words by Julian of Norwich distil into a sentence one of the most remarkable books ever written.

Written by a woman when women weren't encouraged to write; an essay in profoundest theology by someone who called herself 'unlettered'; an account of a near death experience and a vision of the passion of Jesus that she reflected on for the rest of her life; written in vernacular English in a world where serious writing was done only in Latin; and most remarkable of all, a book that envisions a universe in which eternal purposeful Love finds a way to redeem, renew and conserve a creation gone wrong. 

I've read this book often, and deeply. It is theologically provocative, pastorally comforting, but above all a deeply personal account of an experience that touches those universals of human existence, love, death, meaning and purpose. Lately, in the aftermath of Aileen's death, I've gone back to Julian's Revelations of Divine Love. Part of the work of grief, and grief is very hard work, is to sift through the wreckage of life that is left when someone dies whose life was integral to our own life, and essential to our happiness. 

Memories and regrets, hopes and fears, investments of time, energy, emotional commitment and love building over the years, are all parts of life that now seem broken beyond repair. It's a commonplace that grief is the cost and consequence of love. But true nevertheless. Our deepest loves are built towards a lifetime of trust, presence, sacrifice, commitment and the inherent promise always to be there for, and be there with and be there alongside each other. Death interrupts that, indeed death seems to contradict the very hopes that lead us to say such things in the first place.

Our human love cannot guarantee what it hopes for, indeed has no guaranteed outcome. Those prepositions of being there for, with, alongside seem erased by death. What Julian of Norwich brings to our attempts to understand the mystery of love and the power of death to shatter love's hopes, is an exposition of the Love that inspires and underlies and empowers our own capacity to take the risks of love, and to trust the God whose love is revealed finally and fully in Jesus, the eternal self giving love of God. "Inscribed upon the cross we see in shining letters God is love." That old Victorian hymn channels the truth Julian spent her life thinking and writing about. As Julian had already said, "God made all things for love, by the same love keepeth them, and shall keep them without end."

Actually another very different voice comes from an Edwardian Scot, who spent most of his life as a preacher theologian in England, and who was born in Aberdeen. Peter Taylor Forsyth echoed much of Julian's vision of a God who finally, in the end, would bring things to their proper completion. I find his words deeply comforting, and shining with a generosity and hopefulness that finds clear echoes in my own heart:

The end of all is the grace unspeakable, the fullness of glory - all the old splendour fixed, with never one lost good;all the spent toil garnered, all the fragments gathered up, all the lost love found forever, all the lost purity transfigured in holiness, all the promises of the travailing soul now yea and amen, all sin turned to salvation. Eternal thanks be unto God who hath given us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord, and by his grace, the taste of live for every one.

(The photo was taken some years ago on the links at Banff)

Sombre colours, and a thread of gold. The tapestry of our lives.

Over 40 years ago I read W E Sangster's book, The Craft of Sermon Illustration. It is still a workmanlike book for preachers prepared to do the hard work of careful exegesis and imaginative exposition rooted in the text of the Bible. Amongst other pieces of very clear advice to preachers was, read poetry. As a young man I took that to heart and have never regretted it. Most of my life now I've read poetry. A poem is itself an act of interpretation, and an example of the art of self-interpretation. Whether human life, the world around, or the depths and heights of human experience, poetry is a process of reflection, illumination and imaginative response to the world around us and within us.

Early on I came across a poem by Jean Ingelow called 'Regret'. In particular, four lines have remained as memorised wisdom which at different times in my life has provided a way to understand, and if not understand then to accept, and try to learn from, those experiences that cast a shadow over everything else.

I find myself going back to those lines in the aftermath of sudden bereavement and the raw immediacy of grief following our daughter Aileen's death. They can sound trite and more like timid wishful thinking. They may seem less than honest about the bewildered sorrow and gnawing regrets when someone we love as dear as life itself dies, and is now beyond further words of love, comfort, explanation or apology. But here they are:

For life is one, and in its warp and woof

There runs a thread of gold that glitters fair;

And sometimes in the pattern shows most sweet

Where there are sombre colours.

Now I've designed and worked tapestries for years. And sometimes they have been born out of life crises and they became a way of creating brief interludes of equilibrium. You know you're stressed when the thread is pulled too tight; and the discipline of counting cotton strands, and mixing tone and colour requires an attentiveness that gives the mind a break from more painful realities. 

So those words describe an image that has serious and persuasive power for me, especially those times when my own life tapestry has had to be worked with sombre colours. In the overwhelming sense of loss and disorientation that befalls us with the death of someone we have loved as life of our life, it is hard to see any light, and no thread of gold is either apparent or seems even appropriate. For grief compels and requires of each of us our personal encounter with the reality of who and what we have lost...a journey the Psalmist calls "the valley of the shadow of death."

And yet. As a Christian I believe in that thread of gold. As a looked for pencil line of light along the horizon of the long night; as a seed of hope planted in the deep and dark soil of Calvary, awaiting resurrection; as one whose life is a following faithfully after Jesus, believing his words about resurrection and life, the peace only God can give, the love that never lets go, the forgiveness that never turns away. Or that thread of gold glimpsed in the ordinary yet extraordinary kindness and prayers and companionship of those who have come close to share the sorrow and whose love glitters in our darkness. Threads of gold, woven through sombre colours.

Those sombre colours are inevitable, even necessary, for the integrity and balance of the pattern that is our shared life, and every human life. For myself, the thread of gold that runs through my life is neither sentimental optimism nor certainty based on disallowing hard questions. The thread of gold that runs through my life, and that glitters against the sombre colours, is faith that takes the risk of trusting God. I believe deeply, and try to trust daily, the Eternal self-giving love of God revealed in Jesus - his words, his ministry, his death and his resurrection. In Jesus God placed redeeming love and recreative purpose at the centre of all reality.

Such faith clearly gives no immunity to heartbreaking loss, nor does it allow us to evade grief beyond words, nor does it defend us from that inner brokenness of human hearts that may never fully heal. But it does draw those deeply wounding experiences of bereavement, grief, suffering and loss into a larger pattern of meaning. The redemption of suffering, the reconciliation of a broken world, the forgiveness of all we have wronged and all that has wronged us, the renewal of hope in despairing hearts, the restoring of relationships sliced apart by death; however we describe this world's and our own brokenness, love is at work from all eternity, and came into our human history with healing purpose and the gift of a radical hope. The Cross and Resurrection are the beating heart of the Christian gospel, the place where finally and definitively God takes ownership of a shattered creation, and remakes it towards a new future.

For me faith in that kind of God is the thread of gold that glitters, - sometimes, - in the woven texture of our lives. The sombre colours, when they don't obscure it, are part of a larger pattern and purpose of a God whose love raises as many questions as it answers. Which is why Julian of Norwich, that wisest of theologians of the love of God, chose to speak with a simple image about mysteries beyond our ken:

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

And into the eternal care and creative purposes of such love, we have entrusted our daughter Aileen, and ourselves. Sombre colours, and a thread of gold. The tapestry of our lives.  

 

Grief as a Pilgrim Psalm, and an Accompanied Walk on the Emmaus Road

"I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence doth come mine aid?

The old Scottish paraphrase of Psalm 121 is that strange literary hybrid - it lacks literary sophistication, but for those who know it, and have sung it in a Scottish congregation, its homely imagery and verbal simplicity vibrate with spiritual power generated less by liturgical formulae than by an immediate sense of dependency.

Mountains are a challenge, there to be climbed, but often dangerous, demanding and for ancient travellers on foot, full of risk. The Psalmist is engaged in a risk assessment; what are the dangers of the journey? Treacherous screes of broken shale and rock, thieves and wild animals at night, long miles without water in a baking sun, and the threat of madness in moonlight as an ancient fear of the night - all these, and much, much more. Until the Psalmist reduces all the imaginable dangers to a simple theological equation; the Lord and maker of heaven and earth is the protector and guard for every eventuality so that all harm is disarmed, the whole of life is protected, and on the journey, whether coming or going, now and always, the Lord is an ever present help and defence.

Life is risk, and risk aversion can never be the stance of faith. Risk assessment, however, is different. Risk assessment can never exclude danger, but it does avoid both the paralysis of fear that never wants to journey at all, and the reckless certainties of those who think they have life sorted, or that they have God contained in a theology afraid of questions. There are times in our lives when the football cliche rings with a truth that threatens to test our trust to breaking point, when "we've now got a mountain to climb".

Two weeks ago, at our daughter Aileen's funeral, we sang that same old Scottish paraphrase (the full version is below). It was a prayer for ourselves; and it was a prayer for Aileen entrusted to the protective love of the God who never sleeps, God who always watches over, and sees all our comings and goings on earth, and on into the presence of a love eternal and inexhaustible in welcome and blessing. 

We are now climbing the mountain of grief with all its ache, risk and questions, and singing from the deep wells of the heart, "From whence doth come mine aid?" And borne and carried by the prayers and kindnesses of our companions on the way, singing also, "My safety cometh from the Lord, who heaven and earth hath made." 

No, that doesn't settle everything. The journey is harder than we could have imagined. Faith is not unruffled serenity, but a grasping at hope. Faith is a grappling with questions better asked than ignored. Faith is a trust in the preciousness of life and the deepest bonds of love, but also a relinquishing of more than we ever thought we had. And at the heart's core, faith is a vision of a love that understands and comes alongside us on this lonely road, an Emmaus walk that is also a via dolorosa. 

The Emmaus road is an upward road, and broken-hearted disciples of Jesus walk it with questions and sorrow, and the bewilderment of those trying to make sense of a life shattered from within. And the Stranger comes near, walks with them, speaks new things into ears desperate for truth and meaning, and some assurance that all shall be well. Grief is an Emmaus road, up dangerous paths and through dark nights, in the company of the risen Christ. 

1 I to the hills will lift mine eyes:
from whence doth come mine aid?
My safety cometh from the Lord,
who heaven and earth hath made.

2 Thy foot he'll not let slide, nor will
he slumber that thee keeps.
Behold, he that keeps Israel,
he slumbers not, nor sleeps.

3 The Lord thee keeps; the Lord thy shade
on thy right hand doth stay;
the moon by night thee shall not smite
nor yet the sun by day.

4 The Lord shall keep thy soul; he shall
preserve thee from all ill;
henceforth thy going out and in
God keep for ever will.

The Long Silence of a Recent Sorrow.

I have been silent on this blog for well over 5 weeks. That's the longest interruption since I started writing here in 2007. The reason is unarguably valid. On Christmas Eve, December 24th our loved and lovely daughter Aileen, died suddenly and unexpectedly. The silence here is a consequence of sorrow, and the essential ways in which love responds to an all but overwhelming loss. 

On the death of someone so definitive and rooted in who we are as a family, practical things need attending to; priorities are reset with ruthless singularity of purpose; mourning goes along with careful and loving management as itself a signal of deepest love and deepest loss.

Much that could be done has been done, in her memory and in our love for her. Our lives, so diminished and depleted by Aileen's going from us, will take time to recover and find a new shape which carries her presence forward in our family and amongst her friends, as it turns our her many and different friends.

There may come a time when I will be able to reflect more fully on all that has happened. But not now, and not until there are perspectives other than loss, sorrow, and mourning, at present not made easier by memories, but made bearable by our gratitude for Aileen's gift to us of her presence, her personality and the love she gave and inspired. 

Aileen loved Aberdeenshire, and the view of Bennachie from any angle in a range of 20 miles is one of the images that she enjoyed whether sunset or sunrise, rain or sunshine, spring or winter or autumn or winter. 

Living Wittily is a blog that attempts to explore how to live wisely and well, as a person of Christian faith, without arid certainties, with life shaping convictions, and with a wide angled lens on human life and experience. I will continue to write here, but as someone inevitably transformed, and I hope both deepened and made more open, by the gift and the loss of Aileen, whose coming amongst us was such joy, and whose going from us into the safe arms of God is the deepest sadness of our lives.