Trinity

St Augustine wrote of God in his ‘Confessions’:

“You, my God, are supreme… You are the most hidden from us and yet the most present amongst us, the most beautiful and yet the most strong, ever enduring and yet we cannot comprehend you. You are unchangeable and yet you change all things. You are never new, never old, and yet all things have new life from you.”

 

Easter

 

a stone at dawn

cold water in the basin

these walls’ rough plaster

imageless

after the hammering

of so much insistence

on the need for naming

after the travesties

that passed as faces,

grace: the unction

of sheer nonexistence

upwelling in this

hyacinthine freshet

of the unnamed

the faceless

 Amy Clampitt

 

Sunday pause for Thought

 

thorn

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread:
you put this rather beautifully,
and gave me leave to sing my work
until my work became the song.

In sorrow shalt thou eat of it:
a line on which a man might ring
the changes as he tills the ground
from which he was taken. Thistle, thorn

(in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed),
these too shall it bring forth to thee,
all the days of thy life till the end,
the synagogue of the ear of corn.

Poem and plowman cleave the dark.
One can’t eat art. But dust is art,
and unto dust shall I return.
O let my song become my work.

Amanda Jernigan, Adam’s Prayer

 

 

THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MEMORY

  

“Nothing holds firm.  Everything is here today and gone tomorrow.   But the good things of life– truth, justice, and beauty– all great accomplishments need time, constancy, and memory, or they degenerate. The man who feels neither responsibility towards the past nor desire to shape the future is one who forgets.  And I do not know how one can really get at such a person and bring him to his senses.”                                                

 

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer (d. 1945)

 

to love and obey

 

The French scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin sums it up nicely in his book “The Divine Milieu.” He writes:

“God obviously has no need of the products of your busy activity since he could give himself everything without you. The only thing that concerns him, the only thing he desires intensely, is your faithful use of your freedom and the preference you accord him over the things around you. Try to grasp this: the things that are given to you on earth are given to you purely as an exercise, a ‘blank sheet’ on which you make your own mind and heart. You are on a testing ground where God can judge whether you are capable of being translated to heaven and into his presence. You are on trial so that it matters very little what becomes of the fruits of the earth, or what they are worth. The whole question is whether you have learned how to obey and how to love.”

 

​

 

Silence

‘Silence’, said Seraphim, ‘is the cross on which man must crucify his ego’;

‘Silence transfigures a man into an angel; it is the spiritual practice which most surely preserves inner peace.’

He was constantly repeating the words of St Ambrose, ‘I have seen many who were saved by silence but none who were saved by chatter.

 

 

torso

 

torso

We cannot know the indescribable face
Where the eyes like apples ripened. Even so,
His torso has a candelabra’s glow,
His gaze, contained as in a mirror’s grace,

Shines within it. Otherwise his breast
Would not be dazzling. Nor would you recognize
The smile that moves along his curving thighs,
There where love’s strength is caught within its nest.

This stone would not be broken, but intact
Beneath the shoulders’ flowing cataract,
Nor would it glisten like a stallion’s hide,

Brimming with radiance from every side
As a star sparkles. Now it is dawn once more.
All places scrutinize you. You must be reborn.

Delmore Schwartz, Archaic Bust Of Apollo (After Rilke)

 

Rublev for Trinity Sunday

 

Rublev

One day, God walked in, pale from the grey steppe,
slit-eyed against the wind, and stopped,
said, Colour me, breathe your blood into my mouth.

I said, Here is the blood of all our people,
these are their bruises, blue and purple,
gold, brown, and pale green wash of death.

These (god) are the chromatic pains of flesh,
I said, I trust I shall make you blush,
O I shall stain you with the scars of birth

For ever, I shall root you in the wood,
under the sun shall bake you bread
of beechmast, never let you forth

To the white desert, to the starving sand.
But we shall sit and speak around
one table, share one food, one earth.

Rowan Williams

 

 

Easter – and the possibilities of transformation?

 

When we read when we read the Gospel accounts of the resurrection we note how varied  these experiences were.  There is always a mystery, a greater depth,  new things to uncover about the transformation possible because of  Easter.  If we delve beneath the surface of these Easter encounters, we do not find human strength and resolve ,and certainly no blasts of the trumpet or an elaborate liturgies. Instead we find fragility: people who are often at their lowest point, whose whole world has collapsed. In the case of the disciples it is because they believed Jesus to have disappeared for ever. And for us we always come to an Easter celebration  with pressing questions that we want to put to God’s today .  These questions may not be answered immediately or in the way that we want or expect – but Easter is not about putting a heavenly lid on this earthly experience : it is about interpreting earthly experience  in the light of  Christ.  So it is vital that we bring those questions and trying not to hide behind them amidst all the confidence and triumphalism Easter.

This holding together of life and death , light and darkness , sorrow and joy is one of the reasons why  this piece of work  given to me by my friend Nigel Dwyer  is so important . in his workshop he  produced  an image of the resurrection  in the  symbolic  clarity  and likeness of that  glass egg  but surrounds it  with a crown of thorns . it is all placed on a copper base which  refracts the light  and holds  the reality of that Crown in place . It is almost as if the clear brightness of the light  in the egg  bursts out of  the  dangerous  sharpness  of the  points  on that crown of thorns .

So let  us bring  OUR  questions , our Fears,  are vulnerabilities into  the Easter narrative . we are offered freedom to accept  and live  God is risen life  of encounter,  renewal and  forgiveness . This piece of art reminds me that  Christ  encounters us all  in our fragility  and in our love  today  and every day .

 

 

 

Love and Light

 

fresh life

 

and then my heart

pulled itself apart

and, filled to the brim

with a new light,

overflowed with fresh life.

 

now even the heavens

are thankful that

because of love

i have become

the giver of light

 

Rumi