hopeful green

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more

than he.

 

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green

stuff woven.

 

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners,

that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

from Walt Whitman, Song Of Myself

 

 

Surrender of Self?

 

In his  book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff captured a major cultural theme of the last five decades of the twenti­eth century.

Therapy’s triumph in an age of radical individualism has enriched our lives in numerous ways. Almost every facet of our lives has been touched, and in many cases, reshaped by the therapeutic mindset. Thanks to psychology’s therapeutic focus we understand

 

In the therapeutic world of psychology, what is good for the per­sonality and soul of an individual becomes an entitlement one is free to pursue directly and with all the energy one can muster. In fact, one is not only free to pursue it, one has a responsibility to pursue it, and so we see countless people declare that they will settle for nothing less than the good life: a life of happiness, relative ease, and the joy of in­timacy and love. And the pursuit of these goods is direct and focused.

From the perspective of social science, that is, from a rational point of view, there is a certain logic here. If something is good and noble, beneficial and even essential, one would be foolish not to set out on a holy quest to obtain it. It seems that our therapeutic culture has not yet discovered the paradox of the Gospel: some things are achieved only when they are surrendered.

Happiness follows the forgetting of one’s de­sire to be happy and living in such a way as to foster the happiness of oth­ers. Holiness follows the desire to live in harmony with God’s will in selfless praise and thanksgiving. It is best pursued indirectly. Intimacy follows when one trusts that it will come once it is not directly pursued. For like so many of life’s true blessings, intimacy is primarily gift. One prepares oneself through prayer and right living—and one waits.

There are, of course, skills that can be acquired to facilitate relationships and even the attainment of intimacy and union, but they are at best tillers of the soil. Intimacy, like all things that really matter, is a gift of the spirit that cannot be fully earned or merited by one’s sin­gular efforts.

 

The sacrament of Art

David Jones Artist 1895-1974

Art for David Jones is a sacramental process – the record of interface with God.

Artworks are the fragments of traces left over from this colloquy.  These residues are in exact remains and it is their very imperfections that compel artists obsessively to continue with this process of creating each day; and indeed in all of our life it is our failures that are the catalyst to regain the contact we seek from the luminous.  This is the second universal role of art; it takes us away from sectarian divisions into the unifying reality of the divine.  Jones explains religion as a splint (religio:  to bind) which binds all things together, or unifies.  When an artwork succeeds it transcends the maker and even ostensible concerns of style or subject.  By the very nature of its process art is an accessory and transcendent in its function.

 

Some artists therefore have used the apposite analogy with prayer.  To enter into either significantly, the chief problem is to silence our chattering minds.  We pre-empt the challenge of the new or unexpected by filling in the silences needed in order for us to be reflective.  Instinctive reaction is to close down the danger that wonder or mystery presents through unguarded associations, by describing categories and familiar explanations.  Instead as, Metropolitan Anthony insists, our approach should be as if into a cave from which the roar of a wild beast admits.   All our senses alert, the expectation is that anything there emerge from the darkness.  The prayerful approach places the open empirical experience of the artwork first and the verbalising analytical dissection second.

 

Indra’s net

Buddhism uses a similar image to describe the interconnectedness of all phenomena. It is called Indra’s Net. When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in the web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists, or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra’s net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel on the net. Everything that exists in Indra’s web implies all else that exists.

from Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat

 

 

 

TELL ME WHO I AM

Stories are ways of telling others who I am.  But are
there  limits to narrative?

“You cannot tell me who I am, and I cannot tell you who
you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify
you?

That brings us to the second problem.  Although in the
end  we alone are capable of experiencing who we are, we are instinctively
gifted in watching how others experience themselves.  We learn to

life by living together with others, and by living like them—- a
process which has disadvantages as well as blessings.

The greatest disadvantage is that we are too prone to
welcome everybody else’s wrong solution to the problem of life…
a natural laziness… that is why an optimistic view of life is
not necessarily always a virtuous thing…In a world where every
lie has currency, is not anxiety the more real and more human
reaction?

Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.  It is the
fruit of unanswered questions…  One of the moral diseases we
communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together
in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are
afraid to ask.”

-Thomas Merton, NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

 

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 Reverend Jeremy Sampson

(from The Church Times Obits)

SAMPSON. –

On 11 July, the Revd Jeremy John Egerton Sampson: Vicar of North Perak, Malaya (1951-52); Priest-in-Charge of Johore Bahru (1952-57); Vicar of St John the Divine, Ipoh (1957-62); Killingworth (1962-76); Consett (1976-90); Rural Dean of Lanchester (1980-85); aged 89.

 

It was with a mixture of sadness and gratitude that I learnt about Jeremy’s death this week. Jeremy was my first Vicar or training incumbent when I was ordained to a title in the Durham Diocese in 1985. A wise and very modest man Jeremy and his wife Rosemary were a solid team – dependable, un-stuffy, straightforward and steady. He was thoughtful and grounded in the Anglican tradition with forty years of parish experience both here and abroad.

He taught me the bedrock value of the daily office and care over every Baptism, Marriage and Funeral. He was practical and avoided the extremes of Anglican piety – he had a way of smiling at some of the irrelevance of much of modern Church life. His Parish Councils meetings were slow but collaborative – he took care to ensure that all voices were heard. He had an eye for detail and showed his curates how to run a parish with a minimum of fuss or anxiety!

He took a lead when the Steel works closed down and ensured that the Churches voice was heard in the efforts to build up and reconstruct community after the closure and its devastating effects on families. He was a bridge builder bringing all kinds of people together. The parish admired and respected him – he became well know as he waked the dog and made his visits across the community. Folks found in him a trusted pastor.

He was patient with this young curate and I was glad he made considerable efforts to  come to my installation in Windsor in 2009 – he had himself been a curate to the young Robin Woods who was himself to become the Dean of Windsor in the 1960’s. The best advice he ever gave me was this : ‘make sure that every sermon has good news’!

A kind and good man and a faithful servant of the Church. My life has been all the better for my working with and learning from his example.

 

Clergy work in St Georges House

A Church in Bavaria

 

Everything bends

                 to re-enact

             the poem lived,

                             lived, not written,

the poem spoken

              by Christ, who never

         wrote a word,

             saboteur

        of received ideas

who rebuilt Rome

             with the words he

          never wrote;

           whether sacred,

          whether human,

                            himself a sunrise

         of love enlarged,

                  of love, enlarged

William Plomer

 

flint

An emerald is as green as grass;

A ruby red as blood;

A sapphire shines as blue as heaven;

A flint lies in the mud.

 

A diamond is a brilliant stone,

To catch the world’s desire;

An opal holds a fiery spark;

But a flint holds fire.

Christina Rossetti, Jewels

 

St. Peter and the Angel

Delivered out of raw continual pain,

smell of darkness, groans of those others

to whom he was chained–

 

unchained, and led

past the sleepers,

door after door silently opening–

out!

And along a long street’s

majestic emptiness under the moon:

one hand on the angel’s shoulder, one

feeling the air before him,

eyes open but fixed…

 

And not till he saw the angel had left him,

alone and free to resume

the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of

what he had still to do,

not till then did he recognize

this was no dream. More frightening

than arrest, than being chained to his warders:

he could hear his own footsteps suddenly.

Had the angel’s feet

made any sound? He could not recall.

No one had missed him, no one was in pursuit.

He himself must be

the key, now, to the next door,

the next terrors of freedom and joy.

 

Denise Levertov