please click on photo to enlarge
MORE CUMBRIAN COLOUR – that brings to mind the greeting sent to me by an English friend who’s presently visiting “New England in the Fall”, and which arrived the day after I recently posted Fresh Air.
I took one Draught of Life -
I’ll tell you what I paid -
Precisely an existence -
The market price, they said.They weighed me, Dust by Dust -
They balanced Film with Film,
Then handed me my Being’s worth -
A single Dram of Heaven!
I’D NOT SEEN this year’s Britain’s Got Talent until my friend Hilary drew my attention to Charlotte and Jonathan, after a Eucharistic celebration in which Rachael Elizabeth – herself extra-ordinarily connected with her hearers – encouraged us to pay attention to the Dominical command to “love one another”.
I don’t mind telling you that I’ve just howled my eyes out! The connection that Rachael spoke of this morning is so completely and patently present in these two young singers. The odds of pre-judging criticism weighed heavily against them – and for all their youth, they knew it, too. But there’s a mind-blowing, awe-inspiring Grace in the connection between these two, and each brings out the phenomenal charism of the other. Millions have been following the series and will have seen this film before. I’d bet my bottom dollar that no-one will mind watching this one again.
I saw connection and majesty in the Black Dyke Band on Thursday. Now I’ve watched, over and over again, the connection between these two, the power of the encouraging glance, loyalty, mutual admiration, giving and giving some more until it hurts – and then some more still, so that the hurt gives way to joy and glory. This piece of film brings me – literally – to my knees with admiration and awe, and it stretches my heart and lungs to near bursting point. Each “sees” the other – and whenever and with whomsoever that happens we see a glimpse of Heaven. And, as Rachael suggested, in the ultimate fullness of life it’ll be confirmed, irrevocably, that “we’re family”. Let this be our prayer.
The fabulous Ashleigh and Pudsey won this particular competition and I loved their act – and the “connection” between them, too. The singing duo were “runners up”. But I don’t think I’ll ever forget young Charlotte and Jonathan. I’m profoundly struck by the thought that as the Holy Spirit animates God’s Creation by her self-giving, as the loving spirit and anointing grace of Mary Magdalene animated Jesus the Anointed, so Charlotte animates and draws out the song-in-the-soul of Jonathan – though she could easily and blessedly have revelled only in her own. I salute this strong and tender young woman. I am touched to the core by the beauty that each magnifies in the other. There’s deep, deep majesty in them; a paradoxical enormity and littleness about their self-giving humility, a greatness about their gifts – of music and of character.
Deep, deep, deep grace. How does one say a fitting “thank you” for that?
please click image to enlarge
THERE’S AN ENCOUNTER with Heaven in William P Young’s The Shack that has left an indelible mark on me. It’s a vivid, vital vision of colour-expressed emotions
a wash of ruby and vermillion, magenta and violet, as the light and color whirled around and embraced him …
Countless connections. Whirling. Swirling. Shimmering. Glowing. Loving. Forgiving. Embracing. Changing. And – ever since I read the book – gifts of daily such “visions” have delighted me.
The artist Wendy Rudd recently encouraged me, and a group of friends, to let go of “right brain” connection sometimes and let “left brain” make itself heard. I’ve blessed her many times for that encouragement. I let go of mental overload, on a fairly regular basis, by listening / looking instead to “left brain”, allowing wordiness to become colour and image. And colours – perpetually glancing, gently bumping and bouncing into and through one another, make connections and communion …
YOU KNOW people there. Their faces are photographs on the wrong side of your eyes
Carol Ann Duffy, In Your Mind
THERE’S ALWAYS a lot going on in and around the life of a large and busy parish like ours. There are comings and goings in the ordinary sense and also, of course, in the literal sense. New arrivals. New departures. St Michael’s is often involved in celebrating both, and today a couple of hundred or so people gathered to say farewell to Nancy, a much beloved member of the local community and the church family.
Many who share in our Monthly Monday Meditation (blissful tonight after a busy start to the New Year) have spoken quietly of how these times, in this space and place, are for them a bridge between earth and heaven, of having, on these occasions, “a foot in both camps”. And I am thus assured that the teachings of Jesus about prayer are still alive and well; that the oft alluded to “going (alone) up a mountain” to commune with God is still a model that we can rejoice in. Jesus himself was able to be Pontifex – a bridge between heaven and earth – precisely because he had “a foot in both camps”. And it doesn’t matter at all that our view of earth or of heaven is misty. In fact it’s probably better that way. In my experience it’s in the quiet times, in the misty times, that I’m most moved to pray – and yet more importantly, to stay.
Journey's end
FURTHER TO LAST NIGHT’S POST on Life influences I’ve had my nose in one of my most beloved Carlo Carretto books again today: I Sought and I Found. And I’ve been recalling how, across thirty odd years, I’ve quoted this extra-ordinary priest again and again and again. Just at the moment when I was beginning to turn my young attention to reading theology and thoughts of preparing, of “formation”, for the priesthood – and in the case of this book, the very year in which I was ordained priest, 1983, Fr Carlo loomed larger and larger on my horizons. I hope I may be forgiven for indulging in a couple of straight quotes:
We have to grasp that the culture in which we are steeped, the so called ‘current view of religion’ with which the media bombard us, especially here in the West, is completely devoid of theological content and even more devoid of experience of God.
At very best we are purveyed a load of superstitions, trite, worn-out commonplaces, absolutely alien to the great, single, sublime mystery of the Unity in Trinity of God, which is the epitome of all visible and invisible reality, the answer to all the problems, the environment in which we live like fish in water or birds in air, the teeming womb of Love.
Heaven is not up there – though it is up there too.
Heaven is everywhere.
Heaven is up there and down here,
Heaven is the infinitely far and the infinitely near.
Heaven is the secret place, that is, the hidden place, where my Creator lives, and where I, his creature live, where he is there as Father and I am there as child, where he is the spring, and I am the one who thirsts, where he creates and inspires, and I have the potential to create and inspire.Heaven is everywhere, because God is everywhere; and it is called heaven because God is mystery, he is hidden. And it is right that his dwelling place should be called this, out of deference to my immaturity in my ‘becoming’, out of deference to my inclination to half-close my eyes on the path towards the fullness of the All, the path of my progressive discovery of God as Person …
Glory be! How clearly I can now see how this priest has shaped me. How what I read in the late 70s and the early 80s was to have a direct influence and effect upon what I would become, and long to be, and pray for, and hope for, and go on to read, and write, and dare to preach, (see note 5. in Christopher Burkett’s definition of preaching) and seek to live. We’ve absolutely no business allowing ourselves to get caught up, imprisoned, hidebound, by “a load of superstitions, trite, worn-out commonplaces”.
… And because this is so, the light has need of darkness, life must touch non-life, selfless love must discover the fact of selfishness, truth must make its way through the lie, virtue must do battle with sin.
Yes, it is true, I discover the positive of God in the negative of me and the universe, and I know that you need both to have a beautiful photograph.
This is experience of God.
God becomes man so that man may become God, sorrow become joy, the Nothing become the All.
It is meeting.
It is togetherness.
It is begetting.
It is the maturing of the child in the Father’s shadow.
It is the Kingdom of love.
It is the everlasting.
It is paradise.
You living in me and I living in you. Behold journey’s end.When I was a boy I looked for God by directing my gaze towards the light coming from on high.
As a lad I looked for him in my brothers and sisters around me.
When I grew up I sought him along desert tracks.
Now I have come to the end of the road, I have only to close my eyes and there he is, within me.
If I see light I see him in the light, and if I see darkness I feel him in the darkness. But always within me.
I no longer feel even the need to search for him, or to kneel down to pray, or to think or speak in order to communicate with him.
I only need to think of my human state – and there, in faith, I see him in the midst.
For the second evening in a row I am wondering how my own life might have turned out without lifelong relationship with the Source of that life, and with the dear, dear and sometimes very trying Church of God?
A FOND FAREWELL TODAY - for Irene, one of this parish’s (many) treasures. It was a happy occasion. Confident. Irene had shared her faith and her confidence with many more than me. Irene had what she described as “an abiding inner sense of heaven” for years and years. Her friends have written to me of a calmness, serenity and grace that many, many people recognised in her. I think that Irene, a beloved wife, mother, grandmother, artist, counsellor and friend was also, most assuredly, a contemplative. About a month ago we spoke of the confidence in Heaven she shared with Sister Joan Chittister, who wrote:
Heaven is the achievement of the peak of Being. It is full consciousness of Life alive within us. It is, in other words, the end of a long process that we already know even now but too, too often fail to recognize. Heaven is becoming what I am and have always been and am meant to be in full … Heaven is not something we get, in other words; it is something we become. Heaven is something we find within ourselves, something we discover beyond ourselves, something we come to see and learn to touch and begin to feel in us and around us now. Heaven is finding God now and then growing into life always more and more …
Joan Chittister, In Search of Belief, page 49
Every day of our lives blesses us with some new gift or insight. Only a couple of days ago Fr Roger Clarke and I spoke of the priest and poet David Scott whose poem Eyes draws to its close with
I trust one day all will be known
in the deepest bank of the world’s meaning
and on that day our eyes will feast.
DON’T MISS Rabbi Lionel Blue’s Thought for the Day
