Sounding the Divine
– a sequence of theological poems and
reflections
Philosophical
And where do we start? Perhaps, like Barth, with the thundering Word of God; perhaps, like Bultmann, with my personal existential experience; perhaps with a Marxist analysis of injustice. But I think we must start with questions and wonder – why are things the way they are? How did everything come into being? It is not a matter of answering these questions, but they might cause us to stop and think, to stop pursuing the restless hunger of our desires, to begin to confront the perplexities of existence; not as an intellectual exercise but with everything that we are – soul and spirit, mind and body. It is here that theology and poetry embrace – I wonder what the child of their intercourse will be?
Things
Yes, phenomena can be counted
can be described and analyzed
and felt in the magic of thoughts and words and touch
But lingering still
like, perhaps, grandma's perfume in her widowed room
is that uncertain question
Why?
Why things?
Why things and not just nothing?
God
Traditionally these questions have led us towards God and this is still the case in many parts of the world, but nowadays in the West we often, perhaps normally, treat God as ‘a hypothesis I do not require’. That is we consider God to be something which might restrict my personal freedom and therefore an idea which is best marginalized, stigmatized or even entirely obliterated. In the meantime God and those who take God seriously are useful scapegoats for all the problems of the world ‘we are not the cause of our own suffering but God and all ideas about God’. This is lyrically expressed in John Lennon’s anthem to hopeless naivety ‘Imagine’. Despite this contemporary suspicion, I still find myself returning to God as the best foundation for human life, for in this way I can take responsibility for my own failures and inadequacies (or if you like sinfulness) and still have hope that there is a better way, and that life is ultimately meaningful and worth living. It does not seem to me possible to acquire absolute certainty in these matters, but we can, perhaps, acquire some wisdom and learn a way of life which utilizes scientific insights but also values the deep history of humanity and our own lived experience of daily life. In this way we might be able to walk towards the virtues of goodness, beauty, love and truth even while not always remaining within their gracious ambience.
In these meditations I seek to put into words my own sense of God. As someone who seeks to be a Christian and walk in the way of Jesus, the Christian tradition naturally underlies everything which I give voice to here, but I also write instinctively and explore my understanding of the God who enables me to find life beautiful and meaningful. The underlying Christianity is perhaps most obviously expressed in the movement towards love as expressing the fundamental nature of God; in the Christian tradition and in my own experience God can only be meaningfully encountered through and in love. The meditation on God in mystery and wonder must, therefore, move towards a Christian outworking of a life lived in love, for this is the hope and purpose of the life God created.
God is
God is the beginning before the beginning
the end of all endings
the source of being and life and love
Out of nothing something burst into being
out of being life evolved
and the purpose of life is to learn how to love
The mystery is why loving is so hard
why we turn to death so quickly
in order to solve the paradoxes of love
But love, true, earthy love cannot flourish
without a life which is evolving
without a being which is birthed in freedom
And therefore love is God’s final gift
for the one who freely began the beginning
must be the one to consummate the ending
in the gentle explosion of love
The Nature of God
From this visceral, intuitive sense grounded in the Christian tradition I find myself contemplating the nature of God and the words we use to describe God. These are necessarily metaphorical and allegorical but I think as we push and explore them we can gain some useful insight into the nature of the God whom we are seeking and reaching towards. In particular we encounter the extraordinary insight of Christianity that God is Trinity, that God is relationship: a relationship within God, a relationship with us and a relationship with the whole universe of creation.
Trinity
God
the Creator
who has been known as Father
or better Fatherly-Mother
Imagined everything into being
or, if you like, hammered it into existence
or birthed
or caused it to evolve
but
(and this is the thing)
not alone
There was the Son who, perhaps, danced
and there was the Spirit who, perhaps, sang
and the Relationship
imagined everything into being
I find this understanding of God as Trinity essentially simple. It is not an abstruse calculation by academics, but a simple and deep insight into the fundamental nature of things and I have found myself experiencing it simply and profoundly in the natural world and the ordinary passing of life.
Trinity (drinking up the sun)
I was sitting on the hot rocks
Down by the Mediterranean
Drinking up the Sun
Like Life itself.
Beauty all about me:
Sea such a blaze of blue
The island shimmmering like dreams
And no one near me, no one
All around just Trinity
God in total unity
Spirit in blue sky
Beneath Creator
And Jesus, just silent - everywhere
Down by the hot rocks
Near the blazing sea
Drinking up the Sun
Like Holy Communion Wine.
And perhaps we need to keep exploring our images and pictures of God – to push beyond the conventional, to retrieve the forgotten and reimagine God in the images which resonate in new ways within our longing hearts
The God-Mother
If God is not our mother
how can we be born again?
How can we be 'born of the Spirit'
if we do not enter into the womb of the Spirit
if we do not emerge,
screaming,
out of our God-mother
into the dangerous world?
And if we do not feed at the breast
of our God-mother
how are we to be nurtured?
Are we to drink some artificial milk
concocted by men?
Or are we to slurp greedily at the divine breast
huge and brimming with the spiritual milk:
growing healthy and strong
into the men and women
we were born to be?
Encountering God
It is a commonplace of anti-theist discourse that religion and ideas of God are human creations. I find this quite a helpful idea and have little doubt that all our religions are essentially created by men (and it normally is men) for their own purposes. But I do not see this as a negative thing, for my experience is that for all the failures and disappointments of religions they do have the capacity to take us into interesting and necessary places, to be, as it were, a ladder up to heaven or a mine into the treasures of the spirit. That is we reach towards God: lifting up our heads, peering into the deepest ground of our being, stretching out our hands to our brothers and sisters, breathing the sweet air of creation – and it is in doing this that we open ourselves up to the God who is coming towards us with welcoming arms and fiery love. Religion might be an unsatisfactory and sometimes difficult and distasteful thing, but it also puts us in a place where we can encounter God and so reach out into the full possibilities of our humanity
Theology
We make God
Construct a useful being stronger than ourselves
But subject to our prayers and sacrifices
Who needs us
To feed and water his theocratic majesty
Or, perhaps, her maternal generosity
Until the Prophet,
Our child, nurtured by our ritual
Fed at the shrine of our superstition
Guesses the more-than-God
Not just my provincial enforcer
But the beginning-beginning, the beyond-beyond
Who remakes my religion
Turns it against me
Makes me question the greed by which we created God
Seeing
That if God is good and,
Strange, but electrifying thought, loving
Then everything changes.
I touch not my God
But the unimaginable Divine
The not-God
The yes-God
The irresistible for which my greed yearned
And I find life
The thought beyond thought
The feeling behind feeling
As it was once said
I discover the image
In which I was made.
Or, perhaps, to put it more simply
Stories
We create healing stories
stories of hope
stories of faith
stories of love
Stories which mean
that the world can be known
that there is sense
that love persists
And in the pattern that emerges
in the colours woven
in the lives drawn
discover the great Surprise
that we call
God.
Jesus
For me the question of God always comes back to Jesus. In fact it might have been better to have started this meditation with Jesus rather than more abstruse ideas and feelings, this is certainly where my theology began and became alive. In fact my observation is that a belief or interest in God seldom makes much difference to a person’s life unless it is rooted in an encounter with Jesus or some other coherent religious tradition. Not that Jesus is easy. Despite repeated attempts I have never been able to establish a fixed picture of Jesus in my mind. On first reading the Gospel accounts seem straightforward enough, but the more I read them the more difficult it seems to either picture the character of Jesus or fit him into any particular box whether that be contemplative mystic, revolutionary prophet or eschatological preacher. Nonetheless Jesus is always intriguing and often compelling and if I want to make sense of God or my life I always find myself drawn towards Jesus.
doing God
You can do God
uncreated
impassable
all-knowing
or the process in the world
nurturing
creative
fecund
But, in practice, it is better to start with Joshua ben Joseph, better known as Jesus, being
practical
earthy
a human being
who builds a scaffold
to Eternity
That is, it is in Jesus that the idea of God begins to make sense for it takes shape as something we can understand – a human being. And this human being takes our most cherished ideas and convictions and reconstructs them into a new vision of what it means to be human
Peace
I did not want peace
for my body wept tears of justice
longing for the wrongs righted
and the meek made strong
I did not want peace
I chafed at the cosy contented harness
longing for the sparkling eye of freedom
and the adventure of the turbulent way
I did not want peace
having no need for the easy grace
of a gospel which made no demands
as it smoothed my way to heaven
But then I saw the tiny infant
and the stamp of his petulant foot,
the eye sparkling with danger
and the long climb to the terrible cross
And knew at last the whisper of peace
in my soul, troubled and stormy
Narrating the Passion
So in seeking God I am suggesting that we look towards Jesus, and in the search for a spiritual path I suggest we might explore walking the Way of Jesus. It is the whole teaching and life of Jesus that is important and I believe that official western Christianity has tended to underplay the life of Jesus in its concentration on his crucifixion. And yet I find myself drawn time and again back to the visceral reality of the cross, for as I contemplate it I find myself drawn into an encounter with God – a God whose love is so intense that it needed to be expressed in the flesh of a human body which knew defeat, failure and death
Religion
We realized that there must be a God
That was as clear as sunlight
But God's nature?
But God's name?
But God's gender?
That required construction
And it was found to be useful
Could justify merciless acquisition
Could keep women and children and the lower classes in their place
Could build temples touched with genius
It was all very convenient
Until that God
Artfully constructed
Manicured and idolized
Broke loose and became before our startled eyes
A baby
A child
A human being
Practicing mercy
Distributing grace
Prophesying universal equality
Crucifixion was the only answer
The crucifixion is, however, not the sole centre of Christianity although Western Christianity has typically constructed its theology in this way. It is not the crucifixion which builds a bridge between humanity and God but the whole life of Jesus that restores creation and unifies the universe
Burial
There was a kindness in the death
After anguish, gentleness
After insult, respect
And placed in a stone tomb:
No pauper's grave, no pit
Only the sweet smells of the garden,
The serenading of bird song.
Yes, in the end, beauty led him to rest
Love wrapped him
Peace bound him
As the tomb swallowed her brief guest
That is the crucifixion of Jesus leads into the resurrection. The cruel historical reality of legalized murder by torture leads into the event which entirely changes history. For the resurrection is not just something which might or might not have happened as, for instance, Caesar crossing the Rubicon or the murder of Archduke Ferdinand by a Serbian plot but something which changed the nature of reality. No longer is history sliding into inevitable disintegration and disappointment, but it suggests that beyond unavoidable death there is a new life waiting to be born; that there really is hope and that this is a hope which can transform the way we live today
Fear
They had locked the door
A small boy had been posted look-out in the street below
James had fitted two heavy bolts to the thick door:
It might give a few extra minutes when the soldiers called
Finally an escape route had been planned:
out of the back window
across the roof of the baker’s
down into the crush of the swirling streets...
Many reasonable precautions had been taken
But it proved inadequate to in anyway
hinder the arrival of the Lord of Glory
However he came gently
In a crippled body
With the merest breath of wind
And with peace on his lips
For the strange events recorded in the final chapters of the Gospels change everything and make everything much more uncertain. Previously life was a grim but predictable struggle against the reality of death which might be passingly enjoyable but ultimately rather meaningless. The resurrection introduces a new imagination into the world, an imagination which if we embrace it can fill life with joy and wonder
Resurrection
They tried to kill him
suffocate him under scorn
terrorize with scathing words
mock with scandal and derision
crucify
nail
and torture him
but
he would not die
he could not die
or rather died
(buried lifeless in the scarred earth)
and
rose
rebirthed
resurrected
resurrected in flesh
resurrected in lives of loyal friends
resurrected in the imagination of a worried world
The story of Jesus’s passion is unsettling. Not everyone, having heard the story, embraces the joy and possibility which it unleashes but the whole world has been unsettled by the appearance of this new imagination which suggests that everything is not as it seems to be
The Leafy Cross
Why is the cross leafy?
Why does out of death, life spring?
Why does the path of wisdom always lie through suffering?
Why is the way rocky?
The path steep?
The mountain top radiant with the sunlight and the grass scattered with the miraculous flowers?
Why is this the way life is?
And not the ideal city
The beautiful equation
The perfect sphere
Why has it emerged out of the rocks with squirmings and turnings and multiplicity and everything unlikely?
Why is the cross leafy?
Why the raising terrible and full of fear?
Jesus in context
Perhaps it is the very mysteriousness of the life of Jesus that leads me to want to find Jesus in the particularity of whatever context in which I happen to find myself. In these two poems I seek to imagine Jesus in two very different contexts – first that of the urban London where I lived for 25 years and secondly that of the Sussex Downlands in which are to be found my family’s roots.
Urban Christ
I follow
but it is hard to keep the track
Round corners
Down alleys
Always in the most unlikely parts of town
On the hills it is easier
I can see him from miles around
But here it is always glimpses in the crowd
Decisions at crossroads
Sight lines obscured by buildings
and encroaching buses
I follow the Urban Christ
but to the CCTV he is invisible
and of traffic lights he takes no notice
But he is at home here
Knows all the one-way streets and dead ends
He is quick as a cat, sharp as light
and if I am to follow
I must be patient
waiting
with eyes lit and ears trimmed
Jesus of the Downland
A shabby man walks over the brow of the hill
Stopping briefly, he looks for a moment like a scarecrow, stretched against the sky
Then he strides off into the dark woods
People say he used to come here often,
Was a woodsman, hard as iron, but gentle with the children
Used to preach in the old chapel before it was converted
Then he took to shambling into the back row of Holy Communion
Silent but neat as a pin.
I met him once, hat pulled down in the wind,
He talked to me of the woodcraft,
How they cut a stand and coppiced the young trees;
His hands gnarly and grained, but smile bright and I felt warm in the glow of the old wisdom
He was a shepherd too, they said, up on the hill with the sweet grass
Lived in a hut over the summer, knew all the herbs and the folksongs
Kept the sheep safe, taught the young men all he loved
And cared for the living things,
That’s what he did, year on year,
Never used a gun, just knew the way life grew
Christianity
Following Jesus often leads into the embrace of Christianity. This is something many are wary of doing nowadays. The critique of the Enlightenment has cut deep and most people do not want to identify themselves too closely, if at all, with a religion that they associate with conflict, bigotry and old-fashioned attitudes. David Bentley Hart in his engaging Atheist Delusions ably demonstrates some of the inaccuracies of the Enlightenment critique and perhaps the time will come, long after my death, when people will look back on the 20th and 21st centuries with shamefaced amusement at its laughably inaccurate portrayal of Christianity. But in the meantime those of us who value the Christian tradition and know that it is better to be part of something than seek the insipid safety of an individualism which denies any kind of corporate identity, need to find some way of articulating the Christian vision which is not defensive and reactive but is able to engage with the challenges posed by a domineering secular capitalism.
On being a Christian
I believe,
So I am told, in fantastical things:
aqua-perambulations
tricks with bags of skin and bones
interruptions in terrestrial logic
But I have never tried to believe these things
Never practised on the healing of a mild nervous disorder
Before moving on to the more intractable diseases of leprosy and death
Rather I have lived inside the story and found that at every twist and squirm of everyday events
the old stories made sense
brought contemporary wisdom
shed a satisfying light, as an old lamp might in a power cut
And as to the truth of the fantastical stories and archaic myths
They seem true
But concerning their contribution to scientific history and other such modern fads... who knows?
Discipleship
Christianity takes concrete form in what the Evangelicals call discipleship. Having spent some time in that tradition I find the word remains meaningful for me, it seems to draw me back to Galilee when Jesus called a group of young men (and, in their own way, women) to follow him. Here Christian theology starts to get serious as we try to work out what the amazing, beautiful vision of the Christian hope actually means in practice – in the mess and confusions of ordinary life. This begins in the eternal quest for forgiveness – that is acknowledging the hurt I have done to creation, but still finding a way to carry on the journey of being human
Forgive
Forgive me Holy God
For Love I have forsaken
Save me Holy Love
For God I have forgotten
Chosen not Love
but my hurt
Living not free
but in dirt
Forgive me Loving One
Remake my crumbled heart
But Christianity is not primarily concerned with this sinfulness: the failures and disappointments of life, above all it calls us into the challenges of a life lived for the sake of love
If I loved
If I loved
I would be a different person
I would not live the same life
I would change
Not into something perfect
Not into an angel with wings airy and full of grace
Not into a hero magnificent in tragic power
Not into someone who was never angry or never got tired
No, I would still be a human being
It would still be necessary to sneeze and sleep and have some time off
But I would be different
The child living on the streets of Kinshasa
Would not be a distant creature far away in an alien land
No! She would be right here next to me
She would be my sister
She would be my daughter
Yes. I would treat her in a very different way
I would not ignore her
or forget her
or use money to keep her at a distance
Yes it would be very different if I loved
If I could manage, somehow, to be a truly loving person
If I was consumed by love
If love was the fusion of my entire being
If I was like, for instance, Jesus
Then, I would be a very different kind of person
I would change
Maybe, you would not recognise me
Maybe I would appear very, very strange.
Spirituality
I have explored my spirituality previously in The Journey. But in this more prosaic work I also find the need to address the issue of spirituality. Spirituality is a much more contemporary word than theology, religion or discipleship and while some people would want to resist any notion of having a spirituality, for many others it is something which they at least aspire to. It is obvious that if Christianity is going to flourish then it must become a more spiritual religion which is genuinely able to help people develop spiritually and become more mature human beings. There are certainly the resources to do this within the tradition and they have been ably brought together by the likes of Olivier Clement in The Origins of Christian Mysticism and Martin Laird in Into the Silent Land. What is perhaps needed is for churches to become places of spiritual guidance, able to lead people into a transformative encounter with God rather than just trying to get them to assent to Christian doctrines. It is to be hoped that in so doing they do not simply get drawn into Western individualism but are able to create genuinely open communities which can embrace the world and work for the common good.
Spirituality must, therefore, be open and questing – seeking beyond the safe parameters of what the human mind can control and reaching inwards and outwards for the love which empowers us
The Outer Edge of God
To touch the outer edge of God
To reach beyond the orbit of our measured thought
and loose a satellite to wander in uncharted space
To lose control and safe restraints
To grope after the uncensored thought which dwells within
To touch the hem of his billowing cloak
and feel the kiss of his words
returning love
This is the healing we seek
in the inner breath of God
But this seeking must always return to the ground of life, not floating in a remote spiritual realm but part of the ordinary trudge of life
Life
It must always begin
with Life:
this which I taste
but not with mind control
(understand)
just live, and more,
explore
shape
let go, free
into life and more than life
(what I taste, feel, see)
that is...
Eternity
which shapes time
breathes life
enables it to be
seen clearly
heard
(the God
in the midst of everything)
And this seeking is always difficult. We are always missing the divine, mistaking emotion for love, seeing what we want to see rather than what is. Every day we fail to see the God who has come close to us.
The Encounter
If I met God one day;
on the street whilst doing my shopping
or on a park bench
or on the top of a wild Welsh Mountain as the wild winds blew
I would like to ask him
(although it might, of course, be a she)
politely,
to sort out the Middle East
and why people enjoy killing so much
and, perhaps,
for some help with a few embarrassing personal problems.
But I imagine
if I did bump into him on Chatsworth Road
or find a smelly old man sitting next to me
or feel the strength of the wind on my face
I am not sure I would recognized the Lord of all the Infinite Universes
and so might miss the opportunity
It has happened before.
The Church in History
Christian discipleship and spirituality, however, are not an individualistic pursuit. If they are about love then they must involve other people and seek to create what has become known as a Church. Church is, perhaps, even more unpopular than religion and even as Christians we seem to find it increasingly difficult to live happily within the confines of a religious community. The services are too boring. The music is not to my taste. The liturgy is too modern, or too old-fashioned. And, above all, the people are so difficult… and why should I waste my time with these hypocrites and people who do not appreciate me!?! This, of course, is the point: Christian spirituality is only of any value when it helps us love these difficult and annoying people, that is when it draws us out of our solipsistic obsessions and enables us to make a contribution to the flourishing of the earth. The many failures of the church to do this creates an endless amount of ammunition for the criticism of Christianity from Tacitus to Dawkins and we should take notice of this criticism as it can be a valuable source for self reflection, even if it often does seem partial and tendentious. As Christendom dies and the church in the West seeks to find a new way of being we need to find fresh ways of understanding who we are, and listening should be an important part of this. Yet caution is also required. There is a perfectionism in contemporary culture which seeks to distance itself from failure and means we find it easier to criticize than live with the impurity and messiness of human community. The consequence is increasing fragmentation and loneliness where everything is mocked and living together in communities and institutions is increasingly difficult. We should resist criticism that stops us taking the risk of doing church.
Churchgoing
Churchgoing
is a slightly disreputable occupation
nowadays
at least among the people who matter
For they are all Cathars, you see
pure and holy
untainted
by the irrational preoccupations of a fleshy faith
Eternal comedians
they float above the world
unattached
to anything that might sully them
And best of all
they can imagine themselves victims of
persecution
by the spectre of the Inquisition
But criticism of the church has a more positive aspect. It can, perhaps, be seen as gradually freeing the church from the embrace of worldly power so that it is more able to be the body of Christ rather than the handmaiden of the state
After Dover Beach
For centuries the Christ followers gave themselves for the world
Offered up the Nazareth man for the sake of earthly Kingdoms
Lumbered faith with the weight of absolute truth,
That there might be something, some ballast
To restrain the royal greed
Limit the kingly ambition
Turn conquering eyes to another heaven.
True they received power
True they received wealth
True they received extravagant respect
But in the Christ-economy
In the mathematics of the beatitudes,
The physics of the cross
These are less than baubles
Not even that,
To receive them is the true gift:
A gift of the very soul
Received, that the world might come to know
The deep centrality of love
The essential freedom of each human person and
The trustworthiness of the universe.
Now that the gift has been given
Gratitude recedes like Arnold’s tide
And the Christ-lovers,
The Jesus friends
Are set free on an open sea, liberated into the wilds of the priceless Spirit.
But what might this liberated church look like? I think it would be a mistake, often repeated in Christian history, to earnestly pursue a purified church freed of everything I don’t like. We must always live with a complicated and messy church as much as we must live with a complicated and messy world. Nonetheless it is worthwhile remembering that all true reform of the church whether it comes from the old men who escaped into the desert or contemporary beacons of hope such as the L’Arche communities, emerges when serious people gather together in order to pray and learn how to love. It is this rather than campaigns and schemes and reports where the real theology is done.
Church
Not State
Not Institution
Not Established Church
Not Corporations
Not Hierarchies
Not Structures of Command
These are not the seedbed of the Spirit
They may be necessary
May have some capacity to facilitate
May be better, or worse
But the Spirit grows here
in silence
in smallness
in prayer
That is, in the Communities of the Faithful
Who, recovering the ancient wisdom of the desert
here, in the mechanized, cosmopolitan world
doggedly
uncertainly
stumble towards love
Worship
The church is a place to worship. I believe this is health giving: as we look beyond ourselves to the author and the creator we are liberated from solipsism and enabled to embrace the world in a living and vivid way. Surrounded as we are by pain and disappointment we can still experience joy and articulate hope.
Praise Song
And God made known the Name in all the earth
The Name of the Creator
The Name of the Sustainer
The Name of the Beginning and the End
And every flower bloomed its praise
And all the Epynt raised its praise
And Irfon gushed its rushing praise
And great was the praise of the swooping Raven
And great was the praise of the diving Dipper
And intricate was the praising of the spinning spider
And every creature croaked its praise
And every plant and every rock sang its silent song of praise
And man emerging raised his head
And every woman gazed
On the cacophony of praise
And knew in their gut the Nameless Name, the Silent God
Who was the Silence behind the praising
Who was the meaning
Who was the feeling
Deep in their belly called Love
Who began it
And sang it
And called it into life
And never asked but received the praise
For in this way the Earth is whole
Hangs together
Holds
And becomes a home for human life
In the praising
In the raising
In the silence
And the heart flung open wide
Bible
The Church and its worship is central to Christianity but so, also, is the Bible and, in contemporary culture it has just as uncertain a reputation. For some people, such as the Welsh poet Menna Elfin, it is a cornerstone of their life, a source of constant comfort and guidance but for others it is at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous. Many Christians fall between these polarities, liking some parts (typically the New Testament) but avoiding other parts (typically the Old Testament). Personally I’ve always liked the untidy, unruly nature of the Bible – inspiring and terrifying, lucid and confusing, stimulating and boring but always a challenge to any simplistic or antiseptic notions of what it means to be alive. I find Walter Brueggeman’s description of the Hebrew Scriptures as a dominant narrative interlaced with contrary opinions and challenges, very helpful in understanding the nature of the Bible. It seems to me that in a very Jewish way the Bible is constantly arguing with itself, proposing different points of view and demonstrating different perspectives, and any attempt to harmonize these different perspectives into a single, simplistic message is dubious and unhelpful. We really begin to understand the Bible when we can hear its polyphony. These poems are a few of my many meditations on the diversities, perplexities and inspirations of Scripture
I eat the Bible
I eat the Bible
I have done so since childhood
It is good fare for eating
Less good for:
Judicial theology
Basic science
or prescribing morals
Certainly it inspires theology
indicates basic moral necessities in general terms
and, perhaps, encourages the possibility of science
But I prefer regular consumption to intellectual dissection
Finding that this method of digestion
encourages imagination
indicates fruitful lines of reflection
and challenges my flaccid praxis
The Bible carries the history of God while the people, the temples, the controversies have passed away. Even the body of Jesus has vanished from the earth but in the words of Scripture lovingly transmitted over time the ancient witness is preserved – although, of course, the exact nature of the preservation is hotly disputed!
Tabernacle
The portable presence of God
will leave no sign of its passing
No fossil footprint
No stones for archaeologists to survey
No pillars scorched by the desert wind
There will remain no castle walls
No temple precincts
No foundations for the royal palace
You will search in vain for field systems
Or the undulations of earthworks
Even the shadows of postholes will not remain
It has passed on into the stories
into the scraps of papyrus leaves,
The craftsman's work
The beaten gold
Transformed into the breath of words.
Legends will multiply
Myths emerge
and the portable presence of God
will whisper through the centuries.
One of the problems with having words rather than concrete institutions and artifacts through which to remember the history of God’s love affair with the world, is that we can over spiritualize and over individualize the message of Scripture. It is necessary to remember that it’s message is not one of merely individual salvation but is rooted in practical economics and politics
Manna – wilderness economics
There was no wealth to be had in it
No accumulation
Even the rich had to scrabble on the ground
With the slave trash.
Money could buy nothing
You could pay them to gather for you
But the economics didn't work,
There was no technology of preservation
To pull off Joseph's trick:
Predict the futures and rule the world.
Nonetheless the Bible is personal. Many of the most engaging parts of it are the individual stories of people who have had an encounter with God
Parenting
She began the adventure
Opened herself to an unknown future
Said 'yes'
When 'no', or 'wait', or 'let me consider my options'
Would have been the wiser course
Sometimes she would have regretted her decision
As others berated her for her youthful folly.
He was so unpredictable this first child of her womb
So unfathomable
So impossible to parent
And when the end came
And she watched the final grotesque agonies
She must have thought the adventure a terrible mistake
Wishing that everything could be changed
That time could be transformed
And a New Reality born
Love, Grace and Wisdom
My theological meditations now plough more deliberately the furrow of human existence as I seek to earth them in the daily practices of religion. Above all this is about exploring what it means to love, for it seems to me that learning how to love is the real core of theology. In the Christian tradition ‘learning how to love’ is rooted in the experience of grace – that is we love because we are loved by God. This is the all determining reality of the Christian life. Out of this experience of grace and its practical out workings in applied love, it is to be hoped that we might begin to make progress in attaining wisdom, which is perhaps the desire and destination of all true theology.
What We All Need (a poem about love)
A simple love
Keen edged
Warm centred
Unaffected
Without deceit
Not secret
But quietly vibrant
Humble
and Gentle
and Valiant
A love for a world wheezing
and Sneezing
Struggling
For breath
Addicted to death
Looking
Seeking
Peeking
Into every strange corner
For an answer
To questions complex
Heterodox
Perplexing
But needing
Something
Simple
Gentle
Humble
Reasonable
but daring
A love
From above
Reaching below
Low
To the ground
Of our being:
Earth round
but also
Heaven bound
A simple sharp love.
But it is easy for love to become abstract and theoretical, as a wit once said “I love everyone, it’s just people I can’t stand”. Theology perhaps comes alive when it enables us to love and appreciate this individual who is standing before me and blocking the path of my freedom
You and I
I am not different from you
You is I in different clothing
but still made of the same flesh
You is a fresh expression of I
You is a possibility
A beauty I had not dreamt of
You is my brother
You is my sister
The same flesh differently configured
You is the hero I could be
The shining star, the angel
The aspiration for holy change
You is my fear
The I collapsed, denigrated
Driven to a solitary despair
You is the possibility of humanity
A shared strength, a compromise
The one flesh in the many, made ours
And always there is something beyond the words. Words become tiresome – as you might well have experienced if you have managed to read this far(!), we need and long for something beyond words
Fertility
I am tired, Lord, of the restless mind
of the quickness of thought
of the impatience of ideas
I desire a mind mired in wisdom
soaked in the presence of beauty
swamped by the pattern of love
And so I wait in this damp place
where the field unexamined
quickly returns to the bog and the reed bed
Hoping that here
in the land of the warm rain
and the running river
I might find that fertility
of the land loved
and long prayed for
Ecological themes
But theology also needs to reach out beyond the closed circle of humanity and our personal relationship with God. It needs to embrace the whole earth. These poems are not explicitly environmental, but they are rooted in a sense of the earth and seek to understand humanity in our connection with the earth. They are two of my favourite poems and perhaps it is in such an ecological context that God becomes most vividly alive for me. It is necessary for us to understand the specific arena in which God becomes most vivid for us, but without thereby rejecting other insights or experiences. Thus the idea of Jesus dying for my sins and canceling my debt has never resonated with me, but this doesn’t mean I can’t accept that it is part of the tradition and deeply meaningful for many people, and neither does it mean that I shouldn’t question this theology and enter into dialogue with it. My own instinctive sense of the salvation offered in Christ is more rooted in eastern Orthodox practices of restoring the divine image (theosis), probably because this seems to me a better foundation for an ecological theology in which the whole of creation rather than just the human soul is the arena of salvation.
Assumption Day
Mary's day in deep August
The weather's hot
The skin sticky
The trees dark, heavy green
The swallow sky filling with clouds:
Heaven's blue slowly smothered
By the rain-bringers
For today Mary will not rise lighter than the air
But the mother will stay with us
Heavy, warm, fruitful
Buried in the dark earth
An ecological theology tends to become a sacramental theology – in this we are, perhaps, able to move beyond a wordy theology into something simple but profound, something embodied which reaches deep into our flesh and being
Corpus Christi
Here is the word: Receive
receive this all of you
The rain in its wettingness
The sun in its shinyness
The serenading of song thrush
The whirling of wind-rush
The cloud in black and gray
A wet Welsh day
Receive this, all of this
And flesh of the God-man
and blood of the Christ-man
and grace
and the divine face
and food from above
and extravagant love
Receive
and swallow
and ruminate
and contemplate
and digest
The divine gift
all black and earthy and raw
all white and holy and light
all gift
all love
Receive.
Body and illness
As someone who suffers from chronic pain it has become essential for my theology to be contextualized in my body. This continues my concern for a contextualized theology rooted and earthed in actual human experience, only in this way, it seems to me, are we likely to develop a theology which makes any kind of sense. The tediousness of much theology myopically rooted in academic contexts, but unaware of this and using its cultural dominance to impose itself across the world, needs constant challenging by theologies emerging from the depths and margins of human experience.
My theology has become deeply influenced by the Desert Fathers. I find their apparently simple sayings speak deeply into my heart in a way which is much more penetrating than most theologies. My theology is, perhaps, an attempt to recover their insights into the nature of the gospel. In particular I have found the insight into the way in which illness can be a path of holiness especially helpful
Anachoresis
There was no choice
no decision
no conversion
The fleeing from the world
came in my body
with anguish
with angst
with wild anger
It flared in skin hostile and taunt
It groaned in muscles tight and trapped
It came... in weariness
in the world-weariness of weak flesh
and I made the leap
not with a mind clipped and clean
not in a heart faint with fear
but here in the gut-self
body and flesh and eyes-weeping
A theology rooted in an experience of illness has the particular benefit of rooting it in life rather than ideas, the body rather than the brilliant delusions of the mind
On Chronic Pain
I offer
without words
without interpretations
without or analysis
my body
to his body
stretched on the cross
His body
pierced
broken
remade
in the community of saints and sinners
I breathe,
I breathe, drink,
I breathe, drink, swallow
the wine of the Spirit
and follow the narrow way
without explanation or solutions
and without any words
To conclude this section, a prayer which I use regularly when reflecting on my experience of chronic illness
Illness
Loving God
I am broken
and I come before you in need of love
that love which would lift me up in your eternal arms
and make everything better
but it is not so
sometimes you bring healing
sometimes illness is just a passing storm
but it is not so for me
So loving God
I pray for these gifts:
Thankfulness in the midst of sorrow
Openness to healing however it might come, and, in due time,
Release into your loving arms
Death
Finally we must confront death. We can know death in life, if we experience a trauma so deep and profound that it overwhelms life. And it is not always possible to heal this trauma. This, perhaps, is one good reason why Christianity does not limit its perspective to this life, it also sees another horizon which like the sun rising after a long night will eventually rise and smother the darkness with its brightness. This is why martyrs are celebrated, their death is not the last word, things grow out of their apparent defeat. And this is why, living in the hope of the resurrection, we do ultimately look beyond death to the final triumph of life and hope and love. Although life can be dark and overwhelming, it is still possible to hope, if we have faith in this final triumph of God. Many feel this is a foolish belief and that hope is worthless, for them all that remains is endurance and the passionate enjoyment of what life happens to bring our way, but the truth experienced by Christians over the centuries is that hope is not only a comfort in times of trouble but something which transforms life here and now. Something which changes what it means to be human.
Death and the maiden[1]
Melangell in the valley
A winding road
Pheasants litter the way
The mountains rise
Tree-spread
Here where the saint lay
In holy solitude,
And about her feet
The little hares play
She from death
The dog's teeth
The huntsman's knife
The little creatures saved
And to their throbbing bodies
Gave life
Then she returns
To the silent forest
God's wife
I come
To this hidden place
Fringed with pine
And hold strong and sore
A hidden death
Which is mine
Sweet Melangell
I come, perhaps hopeful
to your shrine
We can bring our fear of death and our experience of death in life to God, because we worship a crucified God who knows intimately the taste of death. But the sting of death is drawn because it was a death which was not an end but a beginning
Without the death
Without the death there would be no Pentecost
Without the death there would be no Spirit, filling the lungs with every language known to man
Without the death there would be no Spirit, gently holding us in her mother's arms
For without the death there would have been
no garden full of Angels
no gardener speaking the word
no Emmaus and the breaking of bread
no Peter pleading 'Yes Lord, you know that I love you!'
Without the death they would be no
Paul writing to Romans
there would be no
Christians thrown to the Lions
there would be no
Constantine and his holy empire
there would be no
Francis and his preaching to birds
there would be no
Luther hammering the door
there would be no
Wilberforce stopping the traffic
there would be no
Revival in backstreet churches
there would be no
King denouncing the racists
there would be no
Church on Powerscroft Road [2]
there would be no
Host
there would be no
Feast
there would be no
Funeral with half a thousand people
Without the death we would be alone
There would be no Spirit filling our hearts
There would be no songs filling our lungs
There would be nothing but death and the long loneliness.
Without that death on the cross
Who would we be?
That is we are returned once again to the life of Jesus where the crucifixion segues into the unsettling, transforming story of the resurrection. And in following the way of Jesus we incorporate this story into our own biography
Exploring eternity
One day this body will decay
Heart fail
Gut split
Cancer grab with malevolent claws
One day this breath will stop
Eyes blind
Tongue still
Disease fill me to the brim
But I shall still live
God-filled
Life-brimmed
Raised with the Holy One
Words and poetry
Perhaps theology needs ultimately to come to silence, as it is reported happened to the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas – our words are, after all, entirely inadequate to our theme. And yet for both theology and poetry words are our reason for being, our breath and our life and without them there would be no theology and no poetry. We take the risk of using language. I can find the post-Wittgenstinian obsession with language irritating, as if life was only about the words we use to describe it, but nonetheless it is undoubtedly true that everything we are as human beings is mediated through language. We think in language. We act in language. We live and move and breathe in language, and we would, therefore, do well to use it as well as we can. Ultimately theology and poetry make compatible bedfellows because they are both interested in pushing language to the limits and even, perhaps, in speaking of something beyond the limits of language itself. Here indeed is an exciting adventure.
I Meditate on God
I meditate on God
But not in silence;
in a profusion of words,
a polyfest of syllables,
a chattering of consonants,
a river of rhymes
An articulation of human sounds
Startling to life a sweet downpour of images:
God's finger plunging raw into the earth's belly
ripping the wet scar of Tanganyika.
Himalaya shuddering to birth:
squeezed to life from the earth's mud.
Outpourings of rain veining the earth with rivers,
the precious tricklings of life and sparklings of water
And I feel her presence wrapping me:
the Spirit's gentle kiss, the Mother's love,
And beside me the strong arm of my Brother:
the presence of my blood-friend
All that should have been
drenched in the rain of heaven
Theologian
pray
being what the theologian
thinks
see
being what the theologian
acts
sing
being what the theologian
writes
when theology becomes poetry
it is liberated from words;
when poetry becomes theology
it is, at last, translucent
Finally…
A Message to Myself
You ponder what it means
to be human
but the true matter is
doing human
it is in action we become
even if action
is only meditating
in a desert cell
(for that, in fact,
requires
much practical economics
and a tight network of friends)
Doing human
is the challenge:
how to act in the world
with practical love
you may have limitations:
a body which doesn’t work
a malfunctioning mind
dire and intractable poverty
but the challenge
is still the same
and our response
the measure of our humanity
This begins
with worship
and prayer:
the orientation towards Eternity
(it is easy as sin
for doing human
to become an exercise in
self-aggrandizement)
so we need
to learn humility
and the ability
to let life flow through us
rather than
imagining
we are the generators
of our own salvation
What you do,
then, is,
as they say,
up to you
eco-activism
raising a family
in a household
of hospitality and love
theological education
rooted
in reflection
on human experience
building beautiful houses
singing songs of hope and courage
caring for the dying
bringing to birth new life
these
and many other things
are doing human
So be brave
learn the tradition
wait in your cell
choose words prayerfully
and at every opportunity
do love
© James Ashdown 2015
www.storyman.org.uk