Voice in the Wilderness

Contemplation/Contemplative

2012-01-25T04:48:00.000-08:00

Contemplation/contemplative is traditionally defined as a specific disposition of attentive receptivity. It causes 'experience' to recede. One can dispose oneself towards attentive receptivity but contemplation is itself gratuitous; its arrival may be gradual or without warning; it is often imperceptible except in retrospect because it elides self-consciousness. The word contemplation entails relinquishing all claims to experience; it opens to what is uncircumscribed and other.

To say 'contemplative text' is nonsensical. In addition, visionary texts do not describe contemplation unless, like Julian's, they move the reader from image to the contemplative event-horizon. The same is true for didactic texts. Devotional texts are not 'contemplative', although they may indirectly foster contemplation if only because the practitioner becomes bored with watching him or her self starring in his or her own religious psycho-drama.

Nor can the word contemplative be used for trance-inducing texts, such as Rolle's canor. Trance is liminal, but self-consciousness is still in control. Abstraction—for example, Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ—is not contemplation; abstraction belongs rather to the realm of self-consciousness, not deep mind. In terms of the Middle English texts with which they are usually grouped, only Julian's Long Text (Sloane) and the Cloud are properly associated with contemplation. To these might be added one contemplative interlocutor: Will, of Piers Plowman.

MALWARE ALERT

2012-01-22T13:13:00.001-08:00

The offer of free downloads of my books are being used as bait to get people to download MALWARE, which will take over your computer.

BEWARE!!!

Piracy

2012-01-21T21:20:00.000-08:00

Here is a quote from Sunday's Guardian. The speaker is Rick Falkvinge of Sweden, who is one of the moving demons behind internet piracy:

"It's not theft. It's an infringement on a monopoly. If it was theft and it was property, we wouldn't need a copyright law, ordinary property laws would suffice." Nor does he have any truck with the argument that file-sharing hurts art and artists.

"It's just not true. Musicians earn 114% more since the advent of Napster. The average income per artist has risen 66%, with 28% more artists being able to make a living off their hobby. What is true is that there's an obsolete middle market of managers. And in a functioning market, they would just disappear."

But in any case, he says, it's not about the economy or creativity. "What it boils down to is a privileged elite who've had a monopoly on dictating the narrative. And suddenly they're losing it. We're at a point where this old corporate industry thinks that, in order to survive, it has to dismantle freedom of speech."

What it boils down to, rather, is greedy entrepreneurs like himself wanting to increase their own elite positions.

Where do these cockeyed statistics come from? 'Privileged elite' is hardly a term that applies to the majority of writers and artists who have to support their work with day jobs, often negatively affecting their real work. Some creative people find the tension too great, go mad or kill themselves. Perhaps Falkvinge thinks that you can only be called an 'artist' if you are a financial success. And art is a 'hobby'? Evidently he thinks that only making money at the expense of other people is real work.

Ask any writer or artist: creativity is painful, hard, life-consuming. Annie Dillard compared the creative process to setting fire to the end of your own gut and burning it for light.

Mr Falkvinge is an exceedingly rich man. Perhaps he aspires to being Prince of Thieves, but he is no Robin Hood. Is he going to pay for my food? My rent? Perhaps I should send him an application for a grant. In the last few days I have found three sites offering downloads of two of my books. This represents catastrophic losses for me and my nonprofit publishers. Will he make up the lost revenue for the publishers or my missing royalties?

The copyright question most certainly IS about creativity and an economic sector that allows that creativity to survive. Very few writers make any kind of profit at all, myself included, certainly not enough to live on. Long gone are the days of patronage when writers were supported by their publishers to give them space to create. It's strictly hardscrabble now.

I emailed the host of the pirating sites and one of them has so far been taken down.

The biggest puzzle, in the end, is that these thieves have downloaded moral books. Perhaps this is further evidence of what happens when 'spirituality' is hived off from the context of a value system (religion).

As noted earlier, you can meditate to become a better killer.

How to be Quiet

2012-01-16T22:25:00.000-08:00

Theo asks: 'Hello again, Maggie, Could I trouble you to say a little more about blocking out the static and exercising care about what we expose our minds to and what we put into them that feeds the static.'

Theo, it entirely depends on the person. People are so very different; rules are dangerous because they tend to become ends in themselves. Common sense is the best guide—and a sense of lightness, of play! (See Hugo Rahner's God and Man at Play). The Cloud-author writes of 'good gamesumli play'. However, here are some of the things I am careful about—a scattershot account, I'm afraid, as I am still knackered from the conference (one reason I so rarely go to conferences is that I get overstimulated):

The body is the best starting place: avoid junk or processed food, e.g., ready meals. Eat simple, good food, simply prepared, in moderate quantities. In my view, sugar and white flour are poison, even though I eat them now and again (at Christmas, for example). Drink tea instead of coffee. The body needs exercise: walking can be a great aid to quiet and clear the mind so that insight can arise. Have contact with nature through walking, gardening, or deliberately going to wild places to be quiet. Much of the problem with noisy minds is that we are cut off from our proper context, which is nature. Get enough sleep: 7-8 hours a night. If you are overtired, your brain can get stuck in high gear and there are in my view fewer more unpleasant sensations. Use whatever sleep aids work: I put a warm, not hot, hot water bottle at the foot of the bed on cold nights, and have (granary) toast and milk just before I go to bed if I'm having trouble sleeping. Soft classical music can also help (avoid flutes). Avoid alcohol: an occasional glass of wine with friends over a meal may seem harmless but realise that alcohol both stimulates and depresses, and that the effects can be so subtle that we think nothing is happening—but it is. Slow your breathing down and breathe deeply from the diaphragm. Have a minimal structure to the day without being rigid about it, e.g., times of waking and going to bed, mealtimes.

Music: music activates a very primitive area of the brain. One of the purposes of singing the Office was so that psalm verses and the melodies assigned to them would take on their own life in the deep mind and continually well up during the day as an accompaniment to whatever was going on; but since no one sings the Office any longer, we have to find other music to fill that void. It is still true, however, that 'who sings prays twice'. The musical wellspring can warn as well as accompany: when I sense danger, for example, 'He trusted in God that he would deliver him' from the Messiah often wells up. The Spirit has a sense of humour, so sometimes the upwellings can also provide comic commentary. Classical music such as chant, renaissance or baroque music are good to absorb. The more 'pop' one gets, the more 'easy listening' or even what I think of as 'noodle music'—that is someone fooling around on a piano that's sold as meditation music but really has no structure, depth or melodic value—the more one activates and agitates the superficial, self-conscious mind. Boycott shops that have muzak thumping away and if it is a shop you need to use, be sure to find a manager and tell him or her politely why you won't shop there, pointing out that thumping, caterwauling muzak adds to everyone's stress levels (there are plenty of scientific studies to back up this claim). Take the quieter route: if you have to walk through a noisy part of town, take an alternative route even if it means that you take longer to get where you're going.

Avoid media. Forget the newspapers, throw away your iPod, don't watch television (exceptions: nature programmes, programmes on art, dramas such as Pride and Prejudice). Avoid all images of violence, carnage, betrayal, humiliation. Sometimes, however, banal TV can help quiet the mind down; I'm thinking of reruns of early Law and Order (but not SVU). But TV is insidious, and the images go far deeper than you realise, and tends to overstimulate. It's better to read magazines or books than watch TV, The New Yorker or nonfiction or a novel. Avoid novels that have too much suspense, violence, sex. Again, the images we take in go far deeper than we realise. This may sound like there's not much to read but in fact there's a lot: at the moment I'm reading Gunter Grass's memoir Peeling the Onion; I just finished Robert Bringhurst's Tree of Meaning. Avoid 'spiritual' books that tell you how to shape up your life with exotic practices or special language (jargon), or that separate out 'spirituality' from ordinary life.

At the conference I heard two wonderful papers on Eckhart, whose point is that if you are doing anything special that you mark as 'spiritual' you are going in the wrong direction: this from a Dominican friar. (It's the same reasoning behind my opposition to so-called spiritual direction). It's the same principle as the Ox-herding tale: at the end, the man comes back into the village, covered with mud, riding his ox, and laughing uproariously. There were a number of terrific papers; there were also a few dreadful ones, and I came away convinced that the voyeuristic tendency in the study of so-called spirituality/mysticism is just another form of pornography. Avoid dependent relationships. Cultivate whatever helps you to immerse yourself so that you are self-forgetful. Crafts such as weaving or pottery are often helpful in this regard, eg., Carla Needleman's The Work of Craft.

Avoid people who wind you up, make you anxious or feel bad. If you have a toxic family, you may have to stop having any contact. This is very, very hard and sometimes circumstances mean you have to stay in a situation longer that may perhaps be wise or good, but in the end, tough as it is, breaking off toxic relationships is essential.

Be vigilant about distractions: an opportunity may arise that seems like a good thing, or a creative thing, but may be tempting just because it distracts you. Choose your social activities carefully and limit them. As to thoughts, read Evagrius' account of what to do about thoughts (www.litpress.org/excerpts/9780879073299.pdf). Evagrius anthropomorphizes his techniques in terms of 'demons' but he knew as did Isaac of Nineveh that all demons arise from the human heart (and are figures of its activities). He points to a number of helpful techniques. You use the word 'blocking' about mental static: this, it seems to me, is not quite right because blocking is a kind of fighting, actively engages the static. You want to break the engagement, to ignore it, neither attack nor defend, but turn away to 'reach into the dark'—an image I find helpful, but others may not. The desert fathers and the Cloud-author put this very simply: they say, when your mind is full of static, cry 'help!' or use a short phase such as 'O God, make speed to help me'. Some people find 'Behold' useful—it doesn't matter what word or phrase you use: whatever will break the cycle of noise and focus your attention elsewhere, yielding to, receptive to, the silence. The self-conscious mind has a strong tendency to lock itself into loops, hamster wheels, squirrel cages (the image depends on which side of the Atlantic you are on) and the point is to break open that cycle. Again, physical movement such as walking helps most of all in this regard.

The point is not to engage in some exotic practice but to learn to use whatever is ready to hand. When you wash the dishes, as Zen Buddhists say, wash the dishes. If the noise continues in spite of everything, then simply accept it tranquilly and focus on getting on with your life. If you ignore it, it's more likely to dissolve from lack of attention.

Finally, both laughter and weeping can clear the mind and bring you to silence.

Hope this helps.

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The Place Where You Go to Listen by John Luther Adams (www.johnlutheradams.com/writings/place.html) (www.youtube.com/watch?v=akSaqUVbV00)

"Songs are thoughts which are sung out with the breath when people let themselves be moved by a great force, and ordinary speech no longer suffices.

When the words that we need shoot up of themselves, we have a new song."

-- Orpingalik, a Netsilik elder

They say that she heard things...

At Naalagiagvik, The Place Where You Go To Listen, she would sit alone, in stillness. The wind across the tundra and the little waves lapping on the shore told her secrets. Birds passing overhead spoke to her in strange tongues.

She listened. And she heard. But she rarely spoke of these things. She did not question them. This is the way it is for one who listens.

She spent many days and nights alone, poised with the deep patience of the hunter, her ears and her body attuned to everything around her. Before the wind and the great sea, she took for herself this discipline: always to listen.

She listened for the sound, like drums, of the earth stirring in ancient sleep. She listened for the sound, like stone rain, as rivers of caribou flooded the great plain. She listened, in autumn, for the echo of the call of the last white swan.

She understood the languages of birds. In time, she learned the quiet words of the plants. Closing her eyes, she heard small voices whispering:

"I am uqpik. I am river willow. I am here."

"I am asiaq. I am blueberry. I am here."

The wind brought to her the voices of her ancestors, the old ones, who taught that true wisdom lives far from humankind, deep in the great loneliness.

As she traveled, she listened to the voices of the land, voices speaking the name of each place, carrying the memories of those who live here now and those who have gone.

As she listened, she came to hear the breath of each place -- how the snow falls here, how the ice melts--how, when everything is still -- the air breathes. The drums of her ears throbbed with the heartbeat of this place, a particular rhythm that can be heard in no other place.

Often, she remembered the teaching of an old shaman, who spoke of silam inua -- the inhabiting spirit, the voice of the universe. Silam inua speaks not through ordinary words, but through fire and ice, sunshine and calm seas, the howling of wolves, and the innocence of children, who understand nothing.

In her mind, she heard the words of the shaman, who said of silam inua: "All we know is that it has a gentle voice like a woman, a voice so fine and gentle that even children cannot be afraid".

The heart of winter: She is listening.

Darkness envelopes her -- heavy, luminous with aurora. The mountains, in silhouette, stand silent. There is no wind.

The frozen air is transparent, smooth and brittle; it rings like a knifeblade against bone. The sound of her breath, as it freezes, is a soft murmuring, like cloth on cloth.

The muffled wingbeats of a snowy owl rise and fall, reverberating down long corridors of dream, deep into the earth.

She stands, motionless, listening to the resonant stillness. Then, slowly, she draws a new breath. In a voice not her own, yet somehow strangely familiar, she begins to sing...

This piece has appeared in The North American Review (March/April 1998), and in Terra Nova (Volume 2, Number 3).

Heresy

2012-01-14T13:22:00.000-08:00

Heresy is in the ear of the listener—not the beholder, for one who cries, 'Heresy!' is precisely not beholding. If orthodoxy in early Christianity is about maintaining the paradoxes, then the concept of heresy is itself heretical; linear doctrinal statements destroy the paradoxes. It is absurd for one group to claim that its own provisional, linear, distorted and self-referential doctrinal statement is less heretical than that of another group, for neither can presume to represent the very different epistemology in which grace works. They are a different as a tabloid newspaper and a live holograph. The diagram suggests why the paradoxes must be sustained, for they provide connections between the mind's two epistemologies, between self-consciousness and deep mind. A patristic or medieval writer might say, 'Paradox opens the gate of heaven.'

Christianity in all its forms is today probably more heretical than at any time in its history precisely because it does not sustain the paradoxes, and the paradoxes must be sustained because they serve as descriptors, catalysts, transponders, passkeys, portals, and more. Evagrius' saying, 'Who prays is a theologian and who is a theologian prays' is empirical, observed: for him, as for other patristic writers, doctrine grows out of, and is interpretation of, the mind's work with silence, and must continually be yielded to it.

Any doctrinal statement is virtual: it flattens (and today's language is getting flatter and flatter) the polyvalent insight of the deep mind into two dimensions and kills it; this is one of the insights that fuels objections to credal statements. It also illustrates the absurdity and destructiveness of inserting credal statements into liturgy such as Eucharistic Prayer F in Common Worship. Doctrinal statements, like experience, are necessary but provisional and subject to revision.

Apophatic/Kataphatic

2012-01-06T12:32:00.000-08:00

Apophatic / Kataphatic are two terms that are widely used and equally misunderstood. Apophatic means describing something by negation, e.g., 'it is not this or that' and then negating even the negation. Kataphatic is the other side of this coin, referring to description by positives, e.g., 'it is wet, it is good, it is invisible'. These terms are also used loosely to describe ways of thought that are without images (apophatic) or that use images (kataphatic). The two modes are dependent one on another, and mutually enriching. In terms of the diagram, the term kataphatic reflects the way the self-conscious mind operates, and apophatic the primary way of engaging the deep mind. The apophatic way is not 'elitist': it is simply a question of being willing to do the work of silence, to commit to it. It does not exclude the kataphatic, but balances and informs it. Each factor in the work of silence has its darkness, its counterfeit. For example, the counterfeit of the apophatic way is nihilism; that of the kataphatic, idolatry.

Having said this, the apophatic—especially in our day—is somewhat privileged for the following reasons:

— In order to restore our minds to their optimal balance, we need to co-operate with how the brain in fact works, not fight it ('grace builds on nature'). As Iain McGilchrist describes, the right hemisphere perceives through apophasis:

"This negating or apophatic mode of creation of whatever-it-is reflected in our experience that what we know about things as they truly are, starting with Being itself, is apophatic in nature: we can know only what they are not. Its particular significance is that it describes the path taken to truth by the right hemisphere, which sees things whole, and if asked to describe them has to remain 'silent'. It has no way of coming at what this thing is other than by pointing to it, or by unconcealing it, allowing the thing to reveal itself as much as possible (by not saying 'no' to it but by saying 'no' to whatever lies around and obscures it), as a sculptor chisels away the stone to reveal the form inside. Further, because what the left hemisphere has available to it is only what it does not say 'no' to of what 'presences' to the right hemisphere, it has parts of the whole only, fragments which, if it tries to see the whole, it has wilfully to put together again. It has to try to arrive at understanding by putting together the bits and pieces, positively constructing it from the inside, as though the statue were 'put together'. By such a process, a human person becomes like a Frankenstein's monster, rather than a living being—not for nothing one of the originating metaphors of Romanticism." The Master and His Emissary, pp. 197-198)

— We live in a time where increasing environmental noise and excessive information threaten to overwhelm us. [See Pico Iyar's article, "The Joy of Quiet" in The New York Times, Sunday, January 1, 2012] It is a commonplace that noise is damaging to health at every level. For this reason alone we need to privilege the work of silence. Furthermore, if we are to adapt in the best sense of maintaining balance in the face of this onslaught, we need to learn the art of interior silence, of apophatic listening. We need also to feed that silence with carefully selected information, and learn to block out the words and images that create interior static.

— As noted in the McGilchrist quotation above, we need to privilege the part of our minds that will root us in reality and help us to see the virtual world of self-consciousness—necessary and useful though it may be—for the artificial world that it is.

— It is through apophasis that we open our wounds to be trans-figured, though first they must be articulated in a kataphatic way. Medieval historian Rachel Fulton points to 'Elaine Scarry [who] says something very provocative (and wise) in her The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1986) about how pain destroys language, reduces us to animal cries. "Ah, ah, ah!" But as soon as we break into speech ("Woe is me!"), we take the first small step back into rationality and humanity. We begin to imagine things being other than they are, other than simply pain, and we start to articulate ways in which the world might be otherwise so that we are no longer in pain. Language is a tool for alleviating pain'. (Fencingbeaqratprayer.blogspot.com, 19 November, 2011). The next step in healing is to yield the acknowledged and articulated pain to silence so that the newly acquired perspective may be refined and enlarged, and in this way each part of the mind supports and supplements the other towards healing.

— The apophatic movement is described in Philippians 2:5-11, arguably the central text for Christianity.

—The apophatic way frees us from the fear of death at every level (Heb. 2:15), whether it is of mortality itself, or the investment we have made in self-image, or ideas of how the world works or should work.

In Between

2011-12-30T08:10:00.000-08:00

On this penultimate day of the year, grey and lowering, threatening heavy rain, I walked into town to buy a few vegetables to see me through the weekend and the bank holiday. I went as much to fulfill a need to move, to break the suspended animation of the between season, as to restore food consumption to something resembling normalcy after a few days of what might seem to the ordinary world a laughably small indulgence.

The city centre was, for Oxford, empty. The few people about appeared lethargic—or perhaps it is only me trying to shake off lethargy. But the lady at the kiosk at Tesco refused to take the four steps required to weigh my bananas, so I left them sitting there and walked out. She and the nearby security person, seated firmly on his stool, tried half-heartedly to bully me into using the self-checkout, but I refused, saying they are dehumanizing, they waste time, and I hate being shouted at by a machine.

I moved on, bought my bananas elsewhere, walked home; a misty drop or two began to laze down from the clouds. Even the weather seems exhausted, unable to get its act together to give us some proper and, from an agricultural point of view, badly needed winter cold.

But there is another aspect to this in between time, one that doesn't border on anomie. Along with the earth's solstice, we have the opportunity between Yule and the New Year to take a deep breath, not just to add up our taxes, acknowledge our sins and failings, rejoice in the goodness of life and love, and give thanks—in spite of the horrors of human culture disintegrating around us—but also to learn to wait without anticipation or projection.

This peculiar week is an existential liminality, if you will, a lived-in-time example of the liminality discussed in this blog over the past year. Instead of lapsing into soggy lassitude, we can perhaps glimpse a little of what interior liminality might be.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I find the words mystic, mysticism and mystical completely useless. As William Harmless has pointed out, these are now magnet words for all sorts of weirdness, just as the word experience in its modern sense, when used in a religio-spiritual context, is now tainted with William James' preoccupation with séances, and Thomas Merton's pathologies of narcissim, alcoholism, sexual predation and misogyny.

But if I were, God forbid, forced to try to define them, as I may be at an up-coming conference, I would suggest that they all pertain to liminality: to the attentive receptivity that is willing to relinquish all claims to experience, concepts, and pre-conceptions; that is willing to receive the transfigurative effects of restored communication with, and re-centering in, the deep mind.

This sense is more or less opposite to the scattershot, solipsistic and voyeuristic way these words are currently being used, at both scholarly and popular levels, but research suggests it is much more in line with what ancient, patristic and medieval authors—and those who have preserved or rediscovered the work of silence—are pointing to.

We should remember that Pseudo-Denys, to whom defenders of the current misuse of the word 'mystical' often desperately point, means simply 'mysterious'—he is talking about the way the mind works, about the mysteriousness of the larger part of the mind to which we do not have direct access, where the Spirit is at work, where Christ is enthroned in the seat of the soul. We need also to recall that Gerson's famous definition is usually mistranslated (see the July 15, 2011 post in this blog). In short, contemporary writers are discussing ancient, patristic, medieval and related texts through a methodology that allows for only one epistemology, when in fact the writers of these texts are using models of the mind that employ two epistemologies. The mental models of the latter are far more consonant with the way the mind actually works than that of their modern interpreters.

The mystic, then, would simply be someone who has committed to this re-centering in the deep mind, no matter what the cost. Mystical would refer to beholding and the effects that irrupt from the deep mind and manifest in liminality when self-consciousness is elided (this would exclude claiming as 'mystical' interpretations or experience or phenomena such as visions). And mysticism would refer to the effort, process, and effects of living the absolute primacy of re-centering in the deep mind so that one's daily life is informed by continual beholding.

Happy New Year!

Hodie Christus Natus Est

2011-12-24T17:29:00.000-08:00

Hodie Christus natus est
hodie Salvator apparuit:
hodie in terra canunt Angeli,
laetantur Archangeli:
hodie exsultant justi, dicentes:
Gloria in excelsis Deo, alleluja.

Today is Christ born;
today the Savior has appeared;
today the Angels sing,
the Archangels rejoice;
today those who receive him rejoice, saying:
Glory to God in the highest. Alleluia!

[The translation of justi as 'the just' or 'the righteous' often communicates the wrong impression to today's ear, so I have paraphrased for the sake of meaning. Happy Christmas!]

O Virgo Virginum

2011-12-23T02:08:00.000-08:00

The Sarum rite adds another Great O for Christmas Eve:

O Virgo virginum, quomodo fiet istud? Quia nec primam similem visa es nec habere sequentem.
Filiae Ierusalem, quid me admiramini? Divinum est mysterium hoc quod cernitis.

Virgin of Virgins, how shall this be? for neither before you was any like you, nor shall there be after: Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel at me? the thing which you behold is a divine mystery.

And sometimes on Christmas Eve is sung the following responsory:

Judah and Jerusalem, fear not, nor be dismayed;
Tomorrow go you forth, and the Lord, He will be with you.
Stand still, and you shall see the salvation of the Lord.
Tomorrow go forth, and the Lord, He will be with you.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.
Tomorrow go forth, and the Lord, He will be with you.

Gentle Readers, may each and every one of you have a most blessed Christmas!

O Emmanuel

2011-12-23T02:01:00.000-08:00

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster, expectatio gentium, et Salvator erum: veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster.

O Emmanuel, God with us, Our King and Lawgiver, desired of the nations and their Saviour: Come to save us, O Lord our God.

Solstice

2011-12-22T04:00:00.000-08:00

A watching angel awakened me at exactly the moment of the solstice this morning: 5:30 AM. I'd only had four hours of sleep (writer's insomnia) but saluted the pause, the world's tsimtsum—holding of its breath—at the turn of the year. With strong black coffee in hand I watched light silver the blackness, then shift along the spectrum to midwinter's special blue, and then the blare, the glare of the sun, which today gives us Oxford-Henge: the sun shining directly up Woodstock Road, St Aldates and the Cornmarket.

Windham Hill's first recording entitled Winter Solstice has some particularly evocative cuts: "Engravings II", "New England Morning", "High Plains", "Nollaig", and "A Tale of Two Cities".

And as always on the Solstice, here is John Donne:

A NOCTURNAL UPON ST. LUCY'S DAY, BEING THE SHORTEST DAY, John Donne

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—--things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—--which word wrongs her--—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

O Rex Gentium

2011-12-21T23:43:00.000-08:00

O Rex gentium, et desideratus earum, lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unem: veni, et salva hominem, quem de limo formasti.

O King of Nations and their Desire, the Cornerstone that makes both one: Come, and deliver us, whom you formed from the dust of the earth.

O Oriens

2011-12-20T23:59:00.001-08:00

O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae: veni, et illumina sedentis in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Dayspring, brightness of light eternal, and Sun of Justice: Come, and enlighten those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

O Clavis David

2011-12-20T05:16:00.001-08:00

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel: qui aperis, et nemo claudit; claudis, et nemo aperit: veni et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Key of David, and Sceptre of the House of Israel, who opens and no man shuts, who shuts and no man opens: Come, and bring forth the captive from his prison, he who sits in darkness and in the shadow of death.

O Radix Jesse

2011-12-18T23:38:00.001-08:00

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum, super quem continebunt reges os suum, quem gentes deprecabuntur; veni ad liberandum nos, iam noli tardere.

O Root of Jesse, which stands for an ensign of the people, before whom the kings keep silence and unto whom the Gentiles shall make supplication: Come, to deliver us, and tarry not. Amen.

O Adonai

2011-12-18T00:56:00.001-08:00

O Adonai, et dux domus Israel, qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti, et ei in Sina legem dedisti: veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O Lord and Ruler of the House of Israel, who appeared to Moses in the flame of the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai: come, and redeem us with outstretched arms.

O Sapientia

2011-12-17T11:32:00.000-08:00

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem fortiter, suaviterque disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O Wisdom, who came from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from end to end and ordering all things mightily and sweetly: come, and teach us the way of prudence.

Happy Corporate Christmas

2011-12-16T12:11:00.000-08:00

A little black humour for the holidays. Evidently the Supreme Court of the United States has declared that corporations are persons. Why does this not surprise me?

The person who sent me this URL said, '...declaring the corporation a "person" [is] tantamount to idolatry.'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0WSNRpy3g

In case this link doesn't work (computer dork that I am), the clip is called "Hallelujah Corporations".

The Advent of our God

2011-12-13T01:30:00.000-08:00

... shine forth and let thy light restore
earth's own true loveliness once more.

Last Sunday, when we sang 'On Jordan's Bank', these words leapt out at me—probably due to the Durban climate conference and the ominous ending of the Frozen Planet series.

While it is true that some parts of the earth have been spoiled beyond imagining—the tar sands in Canada, the pollution of the Niger Delta, the industrial sprawl in urban areas, the wasteland (not just sterile earth, but mountains of waste) in far too many developing countries—I don't think the restoration of the physical earth, as desirable as that is, is the focus of these two lines of the hymn.

Rather, it is our attitude that needs enlightening, our eyes that need to be opened, our perspective that needs to be changed so that we see the loveliness inherent to the earth. Such an opening of our eyes would make us recoil in horror at what we have done, undertake to repair the damage, and refuse further despoliation.

Recently I've been playing around with the pre-Socratics, and along the way have looked again at the Greek word logos, which is usually translated as Word in the prologue to the Gospel of John. Perhaps it is translated that way to emphasize the paradox, that the Word in the beginning is silent (God dwells in silence), in a way similar to the opening of Genesis, in a way similar to the name of God in Hebrew Scriptures that is not to be pronounced. The migration of the Word from the silence of God to manifestation on earth also is a way of talking about how language, optimally rooted in, and arising from, continual beholding in the deep mind manifests itself in our self-consciousness as speech without destroying that beholding—the beholding that was, of course, characteristic of our pre-lapsarian life in the Garden of Eden. 'We beheld (theaomai, θεαομαι) his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth'. (John 1:14 KJV)

Elsewhere in this blog we've already talked about behold as the first covenant word (Gen. 1:29), as an exchange of being: God who is beyond being, consents to have his creatures hold him in being in time and space, even as God is holding them in time and eternity. The notion of exchange is intrinsic to beholding. The Prologue of the Gospel of John recapitulates the beholding in the first chapter of Genesis, but it opens further to make explicit what is implicit in Genesis: that it is God's glory in which we share. Perhaps John's Prologue is one of the passages that stimulated Irenaeus to write: 'The glory of God is the human person fully alive, and the glory of the human person is the beholding of God'.

Glory, in Hebrew, has a sense of density; this carries over into the New Testament in Paul's statement about 'the eternal weight of glory' (2Cor 4:17). It is as if we are given not only direct perception but also the ability to see beyond the appearances to the divine radiance itself that we, in beholding, share with God. Our beholding of God imparts to us that radiance, which, if you like, gives added weight (a medieval theologian might say substance) to our being (the mundane image of a star or planet displacing the web of space-time comes to mind). St Benedict's Rule has a thread of this meaning of glory running through it, a thread that is usually ignored in the darker translations of the contemporary age.

But there is another aspect to this glory-bestowing Word which we behold: logos can also be translated as meaning, 'the inward meaning which is expressed in speech, the sense of something, its coherence; orderedness that is both implicate and emergent' [Mark Williams]. It is not unreasonable to think that the author of the gospel is using logos in both senses: it is in the divine exchange of beholding that meaning is given to us, and it is in listening for the Word in deep silence that gives meaning to our speech and enables our two kinds of knowing to work harmoniously together. Equally, the meaning our speech—always fragmentary, a gesture—is enhanced and amplified when it is returned to deep silence to be refined and trans-figured in the direct perception of the glory of God that consents to dwell there. [1]

God truly makes a home with us, to share the divine nature as Word, as Meaning, and as glory.

[1] (See blog post January 9, 2010 or the chapter 'Practical Adoration' in Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding.)

Barking at Angels III

2011-12-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

Enough for him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk,
And a mangerful of hay:
Enough for Him whom Angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.

Julian of Norwich understands the importance of the word 'behold'. Her Revelation of Divine Love is an explication of this single word. 'Behold' is profoundly theological. It describes a reciprocal holding in being, the humility of God sharing the divine nature with what it creates. God, the creator of all, God who is beyond being, in humility allows us, created beings, to hold God in being in space and time, even as God is sustaining us in existence and holding us in eternity.

Behold. Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring—and we need to remember that humility is not aware of injury or humiliation; humility and humiliation are mutually exclusive. Humility knows only love, and God is love. The scandal of the Incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but that God is named before us and, in utter silence, given over into our hands and hearts. And it is in the depths of this beholding, in the silence of the loving heart of God, that the divine exchange takes place most fully, where each of us in our uniqueness and strangeness is transfigured into the divine life. And it is for this that God comes to us, the Word made flesh, stable-born and crucified.

And there is something else in this beholding: the great commandment tells us that this seamless love applies equally to our neighbour as to God. It invites us to abandon our very limited perspectives and ideas, making many aspects of life in community that are difficult not so much easier as irrelevant, to the point of not being noticed.

This living beneath the level of personality unfolds without denying or wasting any of the richness of the human person; it brings us, in our entirety, warts and all, to fullness. To behold God in everything is the antidote to frenetic activity, to stress and busyness. It enables us to live from, continually return to, and dwell in the depth of silent communion with God. And as this is something God does in us, we have only to allow it, to cease our striving and behold.

It might be helpful to realise that we are already, by virtue of the divine indwelling, in that stillness, and it is the thoughts and distractions that drag us away from it. This stillness is the very stillness of the heart of God, which lies in the realm of beholding in itself. We bring everything to it, and we draw everything from it. As we come to the manger, high and low, rich and poor, each brings a gift. Gospel accounts and legends recount a multitude of gifts, but there is one that we share in common, without exception, which each of us bears to the radiant child, and that is suffering: the devastated suffering of those shattered by war; the sorrowful suffering of those who mourn; the anguished suffering of the abused; the hungry suffering of the poor; the hollow suffering of the rich; the interior suffering that is the simple longing that burns for God.

Behold! he is coming with the clouds and everyone shall see him. Behold! the Lamb of God. Behold! the hour comes. Behold! I bring you good tidings. Behold! the Lion of Judah. Behold! I lay in Zion a stumbling block. Behold! I am sending a messenger. Behold! the bridegroom comes. Behold! lift up your eyes. Behold! I show you a mystery. Behold! the tabernacle of God is within you.

Behold! in that dark cave the radiance of the Child; behold! and in that beholding, in the light of his radiance, all else is forgotten, all that preoccupies and troubles us, all our pain and dismay, all our sin and guilt. We bring the gift of suffering, and in receiving it, he takes it from us, transfiguring, giving in return new life, the joy that no one, and nothing, can take from us.

Behold! you shall conceive. It is in the beholding itself that Mary conceives and we also. It is in this self-forgetful beholding, this eternity of love gazing on Love, of Love holding love in being, that all salvation history occurs. The words that come after 'behold' in the angel's announcement are for those who do not behold, who are still chained by the imperious noise of those who wield power and control by means of the fear of death. The Word yearns with the promises of God if only we will turn and behold, and in that beholding, be healed.

Behold: behold, and all the rest will be added unto you. 'Behold,' says the angel. It is in the consent to behold, the fiat that our fear is transmuted into love.

The beholdings that irrupt as annunciations are profoundly dislocating events, whether to the shepherds, to Mary, to First Isaiah, or to us. They are sudden; they take us by surprise, often in the least likely circumstances. When we realise that something beyond our knowing has happened, we may be at first incredulous or even embarrassed. But when we realise that we no longer can dismiss the evidence—the traces left from an encounter hidden even from our selves—we are filled with awe.

Annunciations leave us with a sense of strangeness for we cannot wrap our minds round what has happened. They cannot be circumscribed by concept or by the self-reflexive interpretation we call 'experience'. They are too wonderful, they are beyond what we can ask or imagine, and in their wake life never again will be the same. Yet by welcoming this homely strangeness of God in beholding we learn to welcome the strangeness of our neighbour and, indeed, the strangeness of our selves.

If we choose not to ignore these annunciations—and we ignore them at our peril—we come finally to dread, to a forced choice: to remain in this state of alienation, to seek anaesthesia, or to plunge deeper into faith, into unknowing, relinquishing every preconception, every idea, image, notion we have, including those about God, about our selves, so that these annunciations may change and integrate us.

God, and the fathomless vision that God longs to give, will never fail. It requires only the opening of our hearts for God to purify with the fire of love; God whose thoughts and ways are not ours. Christ's peace is utterly simple, a simplicity that can never be comprehended, only received, and through it we are drawn into the mystery of God's own self-outpouring, into speechless wonder and ineffable joy.

Therefore in this world's night, let us enter more deeply into stillness so that we may behold the herald angels. Let us so plunge into this beholding that its silence and light will radiate even through our own darkness to illumine all the darkness and pain of this world, to announce tidings of great joy for this day and all the days to come.

What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd,
I would bring a lamb.
If I were a wise man,
I would do my part.
Yet what I can I give him,
Give my heart.

Cold Comfort

2011-12-04T05:35:00.000-08:00

This morning I came close to liturgical despair. If I hadn't been sitting in the stalls I might have left. The beauty of Palestrina was shattered by the cack-handed words with which we were assaulted.

First off, there was this abomination from the NRSV:

NRSV

Comfort, O comfort my people,  says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,  and cry to her  that she has served her term,  that her penalty is paid,  that she has received from the Lord’s hand  double for all her sins.

 A voice cries out:  ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,  make straight in the desert a highway for our God.  Every valley shall be lifted up,  and every mountain and hill be made low;  the uneven ground shall become level,  and the rough places a plain.  Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,  and all people shall see it together,  for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’

 A voice says, ‘Cry out!’  And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’  All people are grass,  their constancy is like the flower of the field.  The grass withers, the flower fades,  when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;  surely the people are grass.  The grass withers, the flower fades;  but the word of our God will stand for ever.

Get you up to a high mountain,  O Zion, herald of good tidings;  lift up your voice with strength,  O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,  lift it up, do not fear;  say to the cities of Judah,  ‘Here is your God!’  See, the Lord God comes with might,  and his arm rules for him;  his reward is with him,  and his recompense before him.  He will feed his flock like a shepherd;  he will gather the lambs in his arms,  and carry them in his bosom,  and gently lead the mother sheep.

------

'Here is your God'—here is a parking place; here is your iPod; here is your manicure. If ever the 'beholds' were needed to convey the sense of a biblical passage, it is the three that occur in this passage in the Hebrew in verses 9 and 10. KJV is good about the beholds, for the most part:

------

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.  Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lords hand double for all her sins. 

(3) The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.  Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:  And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. 

(6) The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:  The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.  The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

(9) O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!  Behold, the Lord God will come with strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him.  He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.

----

Next, we were told what was in the Gospel before the gospel was read, as if we might be too stupid to listen for ourselves. I can't imagine any better way to get people to tune out than to infantilize them, than to tell them what the passage is going to say before it says it. The whole point of scripture is that it is to fall upon the ear and work the earth of the heart so that the individual receives what he or she needs.

All of this was bad enough, but the worst was to come. The celebrant used Eucharistic Prayer F, which demands a credal affirmation from the congregation after each paragraph, 'Amen. Lord, we believe'.

The eucharistic prayer is supposed to take us into silence, not into the noisy language of concepts. To put this in McGilchrist's terms, it's supposed to activate the right hemisphere's predominance, not the left. Credal statements are political attempts to force uniformity: they didn't work in the Empire—in fact, they brought more division—, and they don't work now.

Just to top everything off, on Monday there will be Compline—with an address! How utterly inappropriate. Compline is about turning the mind off in preparation for sleep, not about assaulting it with more spoken words. The chant reaches far more primitive areas of the brain; it is the church's lullaby, if you will.

For God's sake—literally—will someone please wake these people up?????

Review in Today's Church Times, 2 December 2011

2011-12-01T16:14:00.000-08:00

‘Maggie Ross, the author of Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding, is an Anglican solitary, who has spent long hours in silence. The book’s subtitle captures its essence; for it is about silence and our need to “behold” God. “Beholding” is a concept that not only are we in danger of losing, but that is often lost in translation, even by the NSRV and the Jerusalem Bible. “Beholding” needs to be rediscovered both in theology and practice. Ross is very aware of “poor talkative Christianity”. There is a twofold plea to enter into silence — for "lack of silence erodes humanity” — and to behold the radiance of God. This is a deep book full of questioning and the testing of our assumptions. Throughout, there is a great love for the world and for our humanity with a sadness at how we are so easily distracted. Was the sin of Adam and Eve that of being distracted? We are invited into a silence that is not necessarily an absence of noise, but is a limitless interior space. Ancient texts are used in new and exciting ways, and many of our worship practices are challenged. She is in no doubt that “the glory of the human being is the beholding of God.’

Canon David Adam is a former Vicar of Holy Island. Church Times, 2 Dec 2011

Barking at Angels II

2011-11-27T01:37:00.000-08:00

[from Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding]

Our God, heav'n cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heav'n and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign.
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.

By contrast, it is a curiously contemporary phenomenon that the public rhetoric of religion employs words such as freedom and liberty even while it is taking away our sense of wonder, crowding our minds with insistent demands and obviating the possibility of any space for contemplation. Thus we are invited to think about our selves and our discontents, especially our fear, which locks us in time instead of gesturing towards eternity.

By associating God with fear, political and religious institutions encourage us to calibrate certainty by establishing rigid conceptual grids. We then try to force our selves and our world to conform to these templates, an exercise that ends in an illusory sense of control. This tragic search for security in exterior validation makes us hostage to what other people think, especially the opinions of those who seek to define the boundaries and content of our lives. Our anxiety is so great that even the fickle wind of chance cannot break our death grip on the wildly vacillating weathervane of others' opinions. This desperate clinging to convention can extend to being afraid to talk about God—or even to pray—outside of carefully scripted parameters, in spite of the fact that such denatured language can twist the thoughts, words, and intentions of our hearts.

Christianity stands in opposition to such closed systems. Its essential message is this: to 'free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death' (Hebrews 2:15). The fear of death can take many forms, most of which have little to do with what might happen after our bodies die. Rather, fear of death is a matter of the mind. It has everything to do with how we perceive and interpret our experience. Our self-consciousness generates anxieties that make us vulnerable to manipulation and coercion in every sphere of our lives, from the most trivial preoccupation with fashion to the fate of our planet. It is our consent to the exploitation of fear and uncertainty that makes us complicit in inflicting physical or spiritual death on our selves or others. Our fretful search or certainty becomes a search for numb complacency.

But faith challenges this complacency. Faith is not about suspending critique but exercising it as it issues from a silent space of love, a reality yet unseen (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is about finding security in insecurity, the realisation that unless we work hard to maintain a hole in the heavens by which the closed universe of anxiety is breached, the fate of everything in our created world will be determined by the human fear of 'death'.

The Christian antidote to the fear of death is summed up in Philippians 2:5-11, often known as the 'kenotic hymn'. Paul's preface is succinct: our problems originate in our anxieties. Their resolution, says Paul, is to 'Let this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus . . . .' (Philippians 2:5, my emphasis).

Christ takes on the burden of our human self-consciousness but is never trapped by its anxieties. He never loses the clarity of his gaze on the Father, the secret exchange of love in faith. Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament gather this gaze and all that it implies into the single word behold. Sadly this word has vanished from modern translations of the Bible and the liturgy, and with it has vanished the most important message that Christianity or any other religion has to offer.

Behold is the marker word throughout the Bible. It signals shifting perspective, the holding together or even the conflating of radically different points of view. It indicates the moment when the language of belief is silenced by the exaltation of faith as these paradoxical perspectives are brought together and generate, as it were, an explosion of silence and light. This silence holds us in thrall, in complete self-forgetfulness. Our settled accounting of ordinary matters is shattered and falls into nothing as light breaks upon us. Beholding is not confined to monastic cells; it is the wellspring of ordinary life transfigured.

The Tree of Meaning

2011-11-21T04:02:00.000-08:00

I am reading a fascinating book by a polymath named Robert Bringhurst, whose expertise includes astrophysics, Native American languages, typography and other disciplines too numerous to mention. He might say they are a single discipline, and I would agree with him. His book is The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology. Here are some quotes from one of his brilliant passages; the last four paragraphs are particularly relevant to recent posts on this blog about the work of silence:

This detour into terminology is all in aid of making a simple point. A story—whether it's myth or fiction or history—typically has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We may not start at the beginning and may never get to the end, but we expect them to exist, like head and foot. This is a sign that stories, like sentences, are individual organisms more than they are communities. An ecosystem is different. A forest has an edge, it has a boundary, and it may, vaguely speaking, have a middle, but it has no beginning and no end, because it isn't a linear structure. It simply starts wherever you enter it and ends wherever you come out. The same is true of a mythology. History may or may not be linear, like a river, as many people claim. Mythology, like the forest, clearly is not.

p. 172 Trees grow in and on the earth. Where do stories grow? They grow in and on storytelling creatures Stories are epiphytes: organisms that grow on other organisms, in much the same way staghorn ferns and tree-dwelling lichens ... grow on trees.

I have a hunch that from a lichen's point of view, the basic function of a tree is to provide a habitat for lichens. I have a hunch that from a story's point of view the function of storytelling creatures—humans for example—is to provide a habitat for stories. I think the stories might be right. That's what you and I are really for: to make it possible for certain kinds of stories to exist.

We don't know very much, strange to say about the biology of stories...
Propp and Hymes discovered ...that whatever the language they're told in, stories tend to have branching, fractal structures, very much like trees.

Those trees, the trees of meaning we call stories, grow in your brain and the rest of your body. And there seems to be a symbiotic relation between those trees of meaning and ourselves. What the stories get out of it is that they get to exist. What we get out of it is guidance. Stories are one of the fundamental ways in which we understand the world. They are probably our best maps and models of the world—and we may yet come to learn that the reason for this is that stories are some of the basic constituents of the world...

p. 173 Thirty years ago, in a lecture in honor of Korzybski ['map is not territory'], Gregory Bateson proposed an idea that startled and frightened his audience. The idea was simple enough. It as that the units of biological evolution and the units of mind are one and the same. This thesis owes something to Darwin, of course, and something to Lamark—an often vilified biologist for whom Bateson had a refreshing degree of respect.. and it owes something to Parmenides, the Presocratic poet who said, among other things το γαρ αυτο νοειν εοτιν τε και ειϖαι. This is a short, sweet, simple Greek sentence which no equally sweet and short and simple English sentence matches. It takes more than one English map, in other words, to portray this little parcel of Greek territory. Here are two approximate translations: (1) To be and to think are the same; (2) to be and to have meaning are the same. The implication of the Greek verb νοειν [noein] is that thought and meaning form a unity which ought not to be dissolved.

The English words noesis, knowledge, and narration all stem from the same root. Thought and meaning are connected not just to each other but to storytelling too. What Parmenides is saying extends to what he's doing. To be and to tell a story are the same. Or: To be is to be a story. Or: I am, therefore I think—and not the arrogant other way around.

Put the Greek philosopher-poet Parmenides and the English biologist Charles Darwin n the same room for a moment and you have the makings of Batson's thesis, positing the unity of biological evolution and mind. Put Parmenides and the Haida philosopher-poet Skaay together for a moment in the same [p. 174] canoe and you have the implicit beginnings of what I like to call ecological linguistics.

I have a hunch that fields of learning worth their salt grow up from their own subject matter. I don't imagine they can be generated by lightning bolts of theory hurled from above. But lightning storms are welcome now and then, if only for the glory of the show, and Bateson's thesis looks to me like an illuminating flash, giving an instantaneous glimpse of what ecological linguistics ought to be ...

[from Bateson's lecture]: If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation, and if you have the idea that you are created in his image you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks, or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races, and the brutes and vegetables.

If this is your estimate of your relations to nature AND YOU HAVE AN ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic byproducts of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing.

The idea, as Bateson says, is a difference that makes a difference. A meaningful difference, in other words. A thought worth thinking is meaning. A tree of meaning is a story. A forest of such stories is a mind. So is a tree with birds in its branches. So is a human with ideas (plural) perching in its brain.

... p 175 Oral culture also means much more than telling stories. It means learning how to hear them, how to nourish them, and how to let them live. It means learning to let stories swim down into yourself, grow large there, and rise back up again. It does not—repeat, does not mean memorizing the lines so you can act the script you've written or recite the book you've read. Oral culture—and any culture at all—involves, as nature does, a lot of repetition. But rote memorization and oral culture are two very different things.

If you embody an oral culture, you are a working part of a place, a part of the soil in which stories live their lives. There will in that event be stories you know by heart—but when the stories come out of your mouth, as when the trees come out of the ground, no two performances will ever be the same. Each incarnation of a story is itself. What rests in the mythteller's heart are the seeds of the tree of meaning. All you can tape or transcribe is a kind of photograph or fossil of the leaves: the frozen forms of spoken words....

p. 176 ... You find the words by walking through the vision, which may be in the heart that is there inside your body, or it may be in the heart that is out there in the land. You learn the trail if you walk it many times, but every time you walk it, you reinvent the steps. There may, of course, be steep and narrow stretches where you memorize the moves—those places in the story often crystallize as songs—but they are subject, even then, to variation and erosion and other form s of change. And they connect you to yourself and to the world.

In an oral culture stories are given voice. They are also given the silence in which to breathe. Vary rarely in oral cultures do you meet people who talk all the time. in literate societies, I meet them rather often....

Christ the King

2011-11-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

OK, folks, the feast is called Christ the King, not 'Jesus the King' for very good theological reasons.

Jesus was a person; Christ (en-Christing) is the process he taught; he wanted us to be as he is, with him, not seen as a remote 'been there, done that' figure who looks down on the rest of us, who did it so we don't have to. This latter view is a product of spiritual sloth, a refusal of the essential work of silence. The icon of the Transfiguration by Theophane the Greek, for example, shows a hierarchy as Jesus and the disciples go up the mountain (left vignette), and the disappearance of hierarchy as they come down (right vignette).

In one of the better translations of the usually obtuse NRSV, today's Epistle (Eph. 1:15-end) asks God to '... give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints ...' (itals. mine). The Gospel of John 14-17 is even more specific.

Jesus ascended for a very good reason: precisely to avoid the Jesus-idolatry that is so prevalent today. St Bernard of Clairvaux goes so far as to say that it's the most important doctrine in the Church.

The feast is about realised eschatology, apocatastasis realised in time, as well as the end of all things. Because that is the way it is even now, in the depths of each human heart, if only we will open to those depths, without needing to nail everything down, which removes all life and joy; which puts sound-proofing, as it were, in what is meant to be an echo chamber. Dear Clergy, you are meant to lead us into that echo chamber, disappear, and leave us there for the Holy Spirit to do her work.

To use hymns about 'Jesus' without the title 'Christ' today is a theological abberration: the name which is above every name is the en-Christed one.

Also an aberration is the contemporary church's tendency to regard congregations as idiots, to slice and dice, calling this the 'kingdom' season, for example, and (shudder) naming all the Sundays of Advent. These are classic examples of making linear and dead what should be left unsaid. The liturgy speaks for itself in all its multidimensional glory, and the congregations are generally better listeners than those who patronise them.

Indigestion

2011-11-17T11:33:00.000-08:00

The C word is suddenly upon us. Sunday is stir-up Sunday, and if the cakes aren't already soaking in their appointed liquor transfusions, this is about the last possible moment to make them.

For weeks it's been leaking sideways into our vision; the shops started early in hopes of mitigating the impact of a terrible economy. The passing of Remembrance Sunday seems to have opened the floodgates, just as Thanksgiving (next Thursday) does in the USA. The pace has quickened; the accoutrements of Yule are everywhere.

(I try to avoid the C word wherever possible, since it isn't any longer. Besides, Yule is such an ancient, warm and encompassing word for the midwinter feast, and it doesn't trivialize the secrets and the mystery of manger and star, which are quietly celebrated by the dwindling few in its midst.)

Yesterday I was in Thornton's, buying some dark chocolate covered gingers for my Devon friend; she hardly ever uses the internet so she won't know from this blog that she will receive them. The woman in front of me was buying three chocolate Advent calendars (perhaps better called pre-Yule-day calendars? postponed gratification calendars? advanced indigestion calendars?) and a whole slew of C. Pudding Truffles—look alikes, that is. A wise mother, get it done early.

That's also been my thinking. With La Niña burgeoning in the Pacific, and in spite of what looks to be the warmest November on record, I don't know if the UK weather will allow another trip to the muddy lanes of deepest, darkest Devon (my friend was snowed in for ten days last year); I've quietly been stocking up so that if I am stuck in Oxford there will be nothing remaining to purchase except the perishables. I loathe shopping at any time, but at Yuletide ....

The nights are drawing down .... we have but seven or so hours of daylight. Just a few days more than a month to the Solstice.

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Barking at Angels

(Part One. This version from Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding)

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

A few years ago the Bodleian Library published a Christmas card that showed the Annunciation to the Shepherds—or rather, to one shepherd, who is standing on a hillside shielding his eyes from the glory of the herald angel. Beside him, his cheeky dog is doing what good sheepdogs do: barking at the strange intruder. It is not hard to imagine the poor shepherd, in dread and awe of this staggering vision, trying to get the dog to shut up long enough to hear what the angelic messenger is saying.

I often wonder if all the fretful, frenetic activity in our lives isn't a human way of barking at angels, of driving away the signs that are everywhere around us; signs that are calling us to stop, to wake up to receive a new and larger perspective, to pay attention to what is most important in life, to behold the face of God in every ordinary moment. These signs press on us most insistently at the turning of the year, when earthly light drains from our lives and we are left wondering in the dark.

The church from ancient times recognised the spiritual value of this winter span of darkness and created in its liturgy what we might think of as a three-months-long Night Office, beginning with the Feast of All Saints on the first of November and ending with Candlemas on February second. This season is a vast parabola of prophecy and vision, a liturgical arcing of eternity through the world's midnight.

The readings—especially those from Isaiah and Revelation—do their best to subvert our perceptions of time and space in order to plunge us into the great stillness at the heart of things, the stillness necessary to make space for what is 'ever ancient and ever new' to break through the clamour of our minds, to open our hearts to the Beloved, to annunciation, and to fruition. Eternity is our dwelling place even in time if only we have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the heart to welcome. 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts,' cry the seraphs, their voices shaking the foundations even as their ineffable wings fold us into the stillness of God (Isaiah 6:3).

Only in this stillness can we know that eyes are being open and ears unstopped; that the lame are leaping like deer and those once silenced singing for joy; that water is springing in the parched wilderness of our pain. Only as we are plunged into the depths of this obscure stillness can we know the wonderful and terrible openings of the seals and the book; the rain of the Just One; the heavens rent by angels ascending and descending; the opening of graves and gifts of hell and the side of Christ.

The Eleventh Hour

2011-11-11T04:37:00.000-08:00

Just back from a break in Devon with a dear friend who really knows how to celebrate in a deep way, with generosity of self in equal measure with books, good and simple food and drink in moderation, and walks. We began with a village bonfire on Guy Fawkes—a bonfire as big as a house! It was on top of a high hill and could be seen for miles, and was followed by fireworks. A great feeling of community, and a perfect night for such an event with a few stars poking through scraps of cloud hastening on their secret missions under a waxing moon.

We were in the part of Devon where the hills are giant green pillows cross-hatched with hedgerows and stone walls, where the coombes shelter fast-flowing streams and woodland. This time of year the hedges are being trimmed, and some of the lanes are bordered by clipped walls fifteen feet high. Mud everywhere, sometimes hubcap deep; mist; damp leaves under foot; the bracken on Exmoor wetly black, having been burned off earlier in the year; stubble fields; pheasant gaudy in the slanting light; end of the apple harvest, perfume of fermenting cider saturating the air.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

* * *

And today: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of—once in a century—the eleventh year.

I happened to be in town and ducked into a church for the two-minute silence. There were some oldies there, purposeful in their waiting. But the stillness was shattered by a cleric appearing at the lectern to announce with gentle officiousness, as if no one there could have had the slightest notion, that silence would be kept. When will these people learn to shut up???!!!

I left, and stood in the churchyard. Much better to be out in the hurly burly. It was deeply moving to see stillness take hold of the bustling shoppers, communicated without words, one by one, until everyone was motionless.

Now We Are Seventy

2011-11-03T11:29:00.001-07:00

Portrait of an Old Woman by Quentin Massys (Matsys) 1466-1529

The Portrait of an Old Woman pictured above is also known as The Ugly Duchess, perhaps because Tenniel used this painting as a basis for his drawing of the Duchess in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. While it has been suggested that there is a connection with a real-life duchess of dubious character who lived in the 14th century, a more likely theory was proposed in 2008 suggesting that the painting depicts an actual woman who has Paget's disease.

Wikipedia describes this picture as '... a satirical portrait painted by the Flemish artist Quentin Matsys around 1513. It shows a grotesque old woman with wrinkled skin and withered breasts (partially visible from her low-cut dress). She wears the aristocratic horned headdress of her youth, by then out of fashion, and holds a red flower in her right hand, at the time a symbol of engagement, indicating that she is trying to attract a suitor. However, it has been described as a bud that will "likely never blossom"'. The entry quotes the In Praise of Folly of Erasmus (a noted misogynist) as a possible source, '...which satirises women who "still play the coquette", "cannot tear themselves away from their mirrors" and "do not hesitate to exhibit their repulsive withered breasts"'. Wikipedia's description is almost as misogynist as Erasmus'.

It is a shocking portrait, shocking in far more ways than we would like to admit. It is shocking that such fine painting should be used to depict so grotesque a subject. It is shocking in the reactions it evokes, from ribald laughter, to satire, to revulsion. People still make fun of this old woman, as they doubtless did in real life; they use her face for practical jokes. Doubtless, despite her apparent rank, she was subject to similar jokes when she was alive, some of them inevitably would have been extremely cruel. The person who views this painting is drawn into the cultural clichés of every age. If she had been a peasant instead of upper middle class, or an aristocrat, she might well have been taken for a witch.

Like a lot of people, I suppose, I have for decades looked at this picture casually and superficially with half-averted eyes, while doing my share of laughing—in fact, on a recent trip to the National Gallery to see the altarpieces exhibit, I bought a postcard as a kind of joke on myself to mark my three-score year and tenth anniversary.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the punch line. This portrait began to read me. And after several weeks of pondering, I now want to call into question the modern reading of this work that links it with Erasmus, along with many other contemporary interpretations of paintings and texts of this age. Even if the painter's intention was in fact satirical, he has ended by subverting his own work.

The key, for me, is in her expression, especially that which radiates from her eyes. There is nothing of the coquette in this face. There is, rather, a calm determination touched with humour; she is ready to turn her mordant wit on herself. She a woman who has endured much, who has no illusions, who is comfortable in her own skin. This is the portrait of a woman who knows she is ugly and has suffered for it—as most of us have suffered who do not have ironed blonde hair, Barbie-doll features and a stick-like physique. She knows what it is to be written off by those who judge a book by its cover. While she may have failed to achieve the status of a married woman, her youthful dress and the unopened flower speak of someone who even at an advanced age still greets every day as a new beginning. She has come to wisdom born of a calm acceptance. Her eyes are clear and actively focused; they look to some greater, wider, more distant horizon—but her gaze is a far cry from the thousand yard stare that appears in other contemporary portraits of women, such as that of Ginevra da Benci by Massys' contemporary and colleague, Leonardo da Vinci, with whom he exchanged drawings.

One of the most intriguing questions that surrounds Massys' Portrait of an Old Woman is why it was painted. Who commissioned it?

The laughter in the old woman's eyes suggests that she sees the whole portrait painting enterprise as an enormous joke; perhaps it was she who insisted on the dated clothing, mutton dressing as lamb, simply to add to the fun; perhaps it was a way of saying what an elderly, wizened and disabled friend of mine, said to me years ago. She herself had been the ugly sister among three great beauties of the day—all of whom, it should be noted, died in bitterness and envy. My friend said that in spite of appearances she was still a young girl inside, dancing until dawn. If this picture was meant to be satirical, then the sitter was lending her irony. Was it a joke that she initiated? Was she trying to make a statement about how the world looks at ugly people and old people? Was she refusing to be dismissed, set aside, overlooked, ignored, despised, discarded? Or was this a portrait commissioned by family or friends who knew her well enough to look below the surface, who recognised something extraordinary in her?

We will never know the answers to these questions.

It is possible to see in this Portrait of an Old Woman an echo of Akibiades' remark about Socrates, '... whose outer aspect was that of a Silen, but whose features concealed a profound inner beauty'. (Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p. 28). Ugly people have their own choices to make, but it is impossible not to wonder if, for some people, ugliness isn't a shortcut to inner beauty. If they are wise, those whom society regards as ugly don't waste a lot of time trying to disguise the fact. They are spared the vanity and anxieties of the superficially beautiful, though they have vanities and anxieties of their own. They learn early in childhood of the prejudice and discrimination against them: they have the choice to be embittered, to hate and to destroy, to become the skeleton at their own feast; or to accept the reality and aim for a different kind of beauty, a beauty that opens before them precisely because they are ugly, and which, with a kind of third eye, they find they can detect in the hearts of others, whatever their appearance.

It is this old woman in her weird beauty, not Ginevra da Benci, to whom I look as a companion as I cross the invisible chronological line between the sixties and the seventies. Her extraordinary face reminds me of one of Gary Snyder's remarks: 'But what emerges from the shock of the wild and the weird may surprise us with its beauty: "Culture is an orchard apple; Nature is a crab," a farmer friend told John Muir ... To go back into the wild is to become sour, astringent, crabbed. Unfertilized, unpruned, tough, resilient, and every spring shockingly beautiful in bloom'. (The Practice of the Wild, p. 179).

Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494) Old Man and Grandson

[NB I will be away from any internet connection from November 5-10; next post will be around November 12]

The Chickens at St Paul's

2011-11-01T01:22:00.000-07:00

'The skies are dark with the wings of chickens coming home to roost.'

Alan Bennett's bon mot was never more aptly applied than to the debacle at St Paul's Cathedral. It links up nicely with the skewing of another catch-phrase, 'Those who live like toffs inevitably will act like toffs'—and that is precisely what the knee-jerk reaction has been at St Paul's—with the notable and laudable exception of Giles Fraser, who is a very rare bird indeed—to a group of people willing to lay their lives on the line to call attention to the flaunted greed of the few who create utter misery for the vast majority, the legacy of capitalism run amok.

Poor Rowan Williams must be wincing, especially having just returned from Zimbabwe, where the church is flourishing in spite of the fact that it has had its buildings and resources confiscated by Mugabe's corrupt pseudo-bishop. What a depressing contrast the spectacle at St Paul's must be for him after experiencing the cries of joy of tens of thousands of impoverished and persecuted worshippers, which must still be ringing in his ear—the praises of people who have heard the gospel and know that it does not depend on status, power, and grand buildings.

On the other hand, why should anyone be surprised at the way St Paul's have acted? To paraphrase once again what Jesus says to his disciples in John 14: such hierarchical, self-regarding systems cannot behold, and therefore they cannot receive the spirit of truth.

How could clergy raised on a tradition of centuries of what I once called the seven devils of women's ordination*—which, of course, the women have absorbed from the men—that is, Power, Pretension, Presumption, Pomposity, Privilege, Preferment and Patronage—how could they be expected to know how to act otherwise? This is not to excuse them, but to point to the fact that the system is rotten to the core with these attitudes; they are inculcated during clergy training; indeed, there are those who become clergy precisely so they can exhibit these attitudes with what they mistakenly assume is impunity. Maybe they can get away with acting like this and even be rewarded for it among themselves, but they do not realise that they are the skeletons at their self-absorbed feast.

Far too many cathedrals and upmarket parishes are little more than concourses for the game of 'I spy the toff'. The denizens of certain churches (especially clerics) don't look at you when you introduce yourself. Even on the very rare occasion that they go through the motions of taking the initiative to speak to you, they merely pretend to engage, all the while looking over your shoulder, to see if there is someone they consider to be really important somewhere else in the room. Then they excuse themselves and sidle over to lionize him or her.

These are also the people who walk about, noses in the air, who wish to maintain their tidy order of persons and nonpersons by categorizing and dismissing the people who enter their buildings: 'Oh,' the cleric (or, often, the cleric's wife) might say, not really listening, '... you must be interested in spirituality. That's Mrs Bunfight's house on Wednesdays at 6 PM'—and ever after avoids you, if he or she catches sight of you, because you are now a nonentity and, worse, embarrassing because you seem to take the practice of Christianity seriously. Such people don't want to be seen talking with you: other people, people who count, might notice. You're not ordained so you're not worth listening or sharing ideas with (you're assumed to be too stupid to understand); you're not a famous face, publicly distinguished or, more important, rich; nor do you carry a title or a rank. It is hard to know if this atmosphere of fawning and social climbing and one-upping is hilarious or excruciating or simply not worth bothering with—probably all of the above.

St Paul's are an embarrassment to the gospels. I have nothing against cathedrals: they can be wonderful spaces for worship; they are living cultural treasures; they keep liturgy alive—I am aware of all the arguments. But aside from a beauty that gives the most determined philistine the opportunity to be taken out of him or her self in stupefaction, in beholding, most cathedrals come across as completely contrary to what the gospels are about; they are refuges for societies based on class and manners. There are exceptions here and there: one or two that make a gesture, even if they may be making that gesture for all the wrong reasons. St Mark's cathedral in Seattle, for example, along with several other large and wealthy parishes in the area, has for years provided space in their car park for the tent city of the homeless as a witness to the suffering of people who often are cast adrift through no fault of their own—not to mention those for whom support and care is not available because they live in a society indifferent to everything but power, money and the media. Such a witness, however, would surely be beneath the notice of snooty St Paul's—and besides, such a witness would be so very vulgarly American.

If St Paul's had chosen to support the protestors it might have finally, if only briefly, justified its existence; it could have set an example for courage and leadership to effect profound changes in society. What a tremendous opportunity has been irredeemably and irrevocably missed, botched, buried. The credibility of the C of E, already rock bottom, seems to have disappeared into the abyss. And after seeing Richard Chartres on television last night, it's completely unrealistic to hope that the C of E will understand that this situation is a catastrophic wake-up call—if not a death-knell.

On this, their feast, the Communion of Saints must be weeping.

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* See this blog May 18, 2009. 'The Seven Devils of Women's Ordination or She Who Lie Down With Dogs Catch Fleas' was originally published as a chapter in Crossing the Boundary edited by Sue Waldrond-Skinner, London: Mowbrays, 1994, pp. 93-131.

Pumpkin Love II

2011-10-29T02:04:00.000-07:00

2011 was the first opportunity I have had in decades to grow pumpkins in the usual fashion. Although the tiny plot had for years been a building site, and in spite of a very cool and dry summer, and unfamiliar seed varieties, there are now several fruits sitting in the conservatory, waiting to be eaten, none of them very large, but usable. I tried the rouge vif d'étampes, and after initial alarm at the colour of the infants—they start out a very pale yellow, as if they were going to drop off—was delighted with their deep rouge blush of ripeness. I use the word 'rouge' advisedly because the red skins give the impression of having been rubbed with the old-fashioned cosmetic. But I'm leery of carving a jack-o-lantern: in spite of the explosion of interest in Hallowe'en in the UK, some people here take great exception to them, not so much because of fundamentalist leanings, but because the roots of dark magic run millennia deep in this part of the world, and ghosts and poltergeists are taken quite seriously. In any event, pumpkin-carving has become fine art, and my crude attempts would embarrass a child!

[First posted July 6, 2008 while living in Alaska]

As noted in the post of June 23, our cold spring and cool summer gave me the idea of bringing some of the vegetables inside, among them a trinity of pumpkin plants. I have always loved pumpkins, not only with a child's glee at jack-o-lanterns, but also with the ever-renewed astonishment that a small seed can produce such a structurally elaborate plant, with its dimorphic blossoms and spectacular fruit. While compassion for shattered lenses and jammed shutters has meant that few photographs of me exist, one of my favorites spared the camera in its taking as I managed to pass as the fourth jack-o-lantern in a row of three specimens of the genuine article.

My fascination is perhaps not as extreme as that of the boy in the short story who succumbed to trout envy, sticking his head under water for longer and longer periods of time until one day he grew gills, slipped into the stream and swam off. I would rather eat a pie than be one. But all the same, my attraction to these plants takes up hours of planning, watering, pruning and watching, a prickly vegetative lectio divina.

I'm happy to report that my pumpkin friends have so far done very well for themselves. They have adapted to the garden window and last week began producing the small globes that are potential fruits, along with many flower buds to provide the pollen essential to their fulfillment. But a dark cloud soon threatened all this cucurbitian bliss. There are no flying insects in my house and I was not about to enslave a bumblebee to do the work of pollination at the cost of its life. To complicate matters, the nubile fruits and their would-be lovers began blooming out of sync. Somehow I had to gather and save the pollen from the male flowers until a female flower bloomed.

In his essay, "How Flowers Changed the World," Loren Eiseley remarks: "Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know—even man himself—would never have existed . . . . Today we know that the appearance of the flowers contained also the equally mystifying emergence of man." But even Eiseley couldn't prepare me for the startling similarity of the pumpkin flowers' sexual organs to our own. It was with some delicacy, then, if not outright hesitation at invading their privacy, that I applied a Q-tip first to one and then, a day or two later, to the other—and waited to see if the little green ball would begin to swell or wither, yellow, and collapse.

Self-knowledge is often painful: I am no good at pumpkin sex. I really don't think it has anything to do with having been celibate for 31 years; you don't forget the basics. But one by one the first few pumpkin globes that suffered my ministrations wrinkled, paled and had to be cut off to encourage the plants to further efforts.

I was terribly apologetic. The pumpkins in their turn were very forgiving. Realizing they had a dork for a caretaker, they decided to start blossoming in sync. This made the process much easier as I could apply flower to flower, all the while blushing and turning my head to one side so as to preserve some semblance of the proprieties. Bees are much more discreet.

This technique seems to have succeeded: there is now a rapidly expanding fruit on each of the vines. I rejoice over them daily, hoping and praying that nothing harms them. I gently pinch off new buds to focus energy; in this environment even one pumpkin per plant would be an amazing outcome.

There is little more to do now except watch the miracle unfold and hope that I don't drop the watering can as I reach over the fattening orbs to give the tomatoes a drink. We're past the solstice; autumn is rushing toward us. The fireweed is about to bloom, and when their petals reach the top of the stalk, winter will be only six weeks away.

Riddling Exegesis

2011-10-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 45:3-7 'Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and strip kings of their robes, to open doors before him—and the gates shall not be closed: 2) I will go before you and level the mountains, I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron, 3) I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name. 4) For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I surname you, though you do not know me.

5)' I am the Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no god. I arm you, though you do not know me, 6) so that they may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is no one besides me; I am the Lord, and there is no other. 7) I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things'.

There is a school of exegesis that says there is nothing of the contemplative life in the Bible. This seems to me to be one of the more extreme expressions of a) a tired but still fashionable scientism among academics, and b) yet another consequence of the loss of the work of silence. Recently I heard a sermon in which the first part of the above passage was interpreted to mean 'mineral wealth'.

Now certainly Cyrus had the opportunity to strip the land of its mineral wealth, but I don't think that's what this passage is saying. Rather, it may be saying something quite amazing, something that would have been absolutely shocking to Second Isaiah's readers or hearers.

First, the passage speaks of Cyrus as the Lord's anointed. This is startling enough: Cyrus, who is most certainly not numbered amongst the 'Chosen people' is anointed with the spirit of God over these peoples; he is to be God's messenger. The second verse sounds far more like military road construction and the looting of palaces than 'mineral wealth'.

But the chapter progressively deepens. Verse 3 is more likely about mining the soul than the earth, a bestowal of deep knowledge, an intimate knowledge of God hidden in the heart so that Cyrus will act from out of this knowledge, even if he does not acknowledge the Lord or worship him. The passage is stating firmly that the knowledge of God is not confined to one people or another, or one way of interpretation or another, and indeed that the knowledge of God by foreign nations and kings in fact can benefit Jacob and Israel—in this case by their necessary humbling. Indeed, the Lord goes so far as to give Cyrus a patrimony, a surname.

Verses 5-7 are a reiteration of the summary of the law and an echo of the beholding in the creation story—again, all the more extraordinary because the recapitulation of this knowledge will come through Cyrus—who does not keep the law. It is through this alien king that those who do acknowledge the Lord and keep the law may be taught by God, reminded that God can use anything and anyone to convey the message that idols of any sort—and even the law can be an idol—are insignificant in comparison to the over-riding vision, the beholding of God, which should rule their days.

Isaiah is telling the people that the knowledge of God and the workings of God are not what you might expect: they are found in what may seem the least likely people and places, including those whom you dread, and whose appearing distresses you.

This theme is, of course, picked up by Jesus: you do not know the day or the hour (Mt. 24:42); God's revelation is hidden from the wise and revealed to infants (Mt. 11:25); the prostitutes and tax collectors will enter the kingdom of heaven first (Mt. 21:31).

Like beauty in the eye of the beholder, the word of God is in the ear of the hearer: it is everywhere. Only those who are not preoccupied with the materialism of the law and its institutions are likely to receive it (a notion echoed in John 14).

The Princess and the Pigpen

2011-10-19T07:30:00.000-07:00

[Originally Posted October 19, 2009]

Sermon for the Solemnity of St Frideswide, All Saints Convent, October 19, 2009 [Ephesians 3:14-19]

Frideswide belongs to that group of women saints who seem to inspire veneration from men by defying them. I use gendered language advisedly, for much of her life and her legacy are fraught with such issues. A multi-paneled window in the Latin chapel at Christ Church depicts the life of this 7th century Ango-Saxon woman, who preferred to contemplate God in her priory rather than live as consort in the court of Algar, the Mercian king.

Even so, his relentless importunings forced her to flee the monastery for a time to take refuge in the muck and mud of a pigsty. But she was without rancour, for when Algar was struck blind, she caused him to be healed by water from the well at Binsey that miraculously appeared in response to her prayerful compassion.

These days we have an uneasy relationship with hagiography in general, and it has to be said that the church, and Christ Church in particular, which is built on the site of Frideswide's foundation, appear to have had a vexed relationship with her from the beginning. This history makes her patronage of Oxford all the more remarkable in a post-Christian era.

In the Middle Ages, Frideswide's nuns were kicked out of their priory to make room for some Austin canons, who in turn were evicted so Cardinal Wolsey—and subsequently his overlord—could establish a college in a university whose foundation, in spite of its motto—Dominus illuminatio mea—was not prayer but dialectic.

It is unsurprising, then, that during the Reformation, the medieval shrine was smashed, and her bones, so legend has it, thrown on the midden. Sometime later, a bag made of cloth of silver containing some bones was found in the cathedral. For years, wishful thinking suggested these bones were hers, a speculation that now has been disproved. However, Jim Godfrey, the verger at the cathedral, says it is thought that the bones are somewhere in the building, but no one is quite sure where.

When I first came to Oxford twenty-five years ago, a dignified, polished black stone with Frideswide's name beautifully carved was set apart by a low railing on the floor of the Lady chapel. The fragments of the old shrine and the watching loft rested in the background. At the time, I was living in college and had a set a keys to the cathedral. On her feast I used to go in very early to put a lily on her stone—anonymously I hoped—a gesture that I realize in retrospect very likely irritated the somewhat erastian dean and all-male canons of the day.

It wasn't the bones I sought to honour—I never assumed they were there. It was rather to keep alive the memory of an intransigently holy woman in an excessively male world—both her world of the 7th century and mine of the cathedral in the late 1980s. Since then, the parameters of the shrine and the legend have continued to shift: recently the entire Lady chapel area was altered yet again. The medieval shrine has been relocated to the Latin chapel, and the stone with Frideswide's name on it is covered with chairs and appears to be more or less ignored.

My attention to Frideswide while I lived at Christ Church was something of a departure as I have never been much of one for shrines or relics except to appreciate the great art that was often lavished upon them. [2] But Christ Church is an ancient place, and the communion of the particular saints who are buried or remembered there is vibrantly living and active, as anyone who prays in that building morning after early morning comes to realize.

Whether or not the person or persons who decided to make Frideswide patron saint of the county, city, and university—of government, commerce, and argument—were aware of her vital presence is not relevant here. It was a good idea for the simple reason that is proclaimed in today's epistle, that following her we might "will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the eight and the depth; until, knowing the love of Christ which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God.."

But there is a problem in the translation of this passage, for the word "grasp" seems to contradict its meaning that the love of Christ is limitless. "Grasp" implies that the saints have subjected this love to the constraints of dialectic, when in fact they have refused to make any claim, intellectual or otherwise, that might put limits on it. They revel in un-grasping so that they might instead be claimed by that which surpasses knowledge; as one lexicon puts it, "Christ by his holy power and influence laying hold of the human mind and will, in order to prompt and govern it." The saints are set on fire by this limitless vision of outpouring love, which they mirror, as opposed to domesticating it into a manageable commodity.

I would like to suggest that the particular grace Frideswide has to give us is that of an overarching vision, a glimpse of our share in the divine nature to which the rest of life may become subject, even if we are reduced to seeking refuge in a pigpen. We might say that Frideswide came into the fullness of her princely status in that porcine context, the self-emptying that is royal priesthood made manifest through putting on the mind of Christ.

Unfortunately, this way of knowing and the exalted view of the human person that is its consequence, is almost entirely absent from our relativistic and fragmented consumer culture. How many people today have a sense of vocation at all, much less one that is willing to put up with muck and mud and persecution?

Yet an overarching vision is not an exotic notion. Blackberry picking provides a homely analogy. It's simple cause and effect: if you want berries in any useful quantity, you're going to get scratched, no matter how carefully you prune the canes or protect your arms. You either can just get on with it and plunge in, testing each berry for ripeness, pulling it off or leaving it, so focused that you don't notice the thorns, and pick a gallon in an hour. Or you can cringe and whinge and shrink from the task, in which case it will take an hour to fill a small pummet, while every encounter with the slightest thorn will feel like an injection and an affront.

These days it seems as though people spend an awful lot of time kicking against the pricks, no matter how tasty or life-enhancing the feast set before them for the taking. We seem to rank what is important to us by how easy it is to obtain; we persuade ourselves that we have a right to immediate gratification without effort or discomfort, without having serious demands made on us.

We are thus conditioned to compete for status, to defend our imagined territories, to look out for Number One, no matter how destructive to the common good, to charity or hospitality, to the making of peace, much less our souls. Worst of all, these attitudes destroy any notion of what used to be called integrity, a word we hardly hear any longer, which is the opposite of narcissism. We are left floundering in a quicksand of shifting loyalties and appetites that bubble in and out of fashion.

Frideswide's gift is celebrated every year in a grand Evensong held on the Tuesday closest to her feast. [1] This service reminds the officials who attend that while governments may come and go, commerce may fail, and dialectic cease, our life together in all its diversity is sustained by an overarching vision. We may not need to endure tempest and pigsty as Frideswide did, but to survive as a human community in this complex and dangerous world requires a motivation that drives us beyond our selfish short-term interests and discomfort.

For those of us gathered here in this chapel where the communion of All Saints is lively and active, Frideswide's grace questions each of us daily and directly: What is my overarching vision? What do I really want? What price am I willing to pay? What goal would strengthen me to suffer anything in pursuit of it so that I may contribute to the common good?

What will enable me, along with Frideswide and all the saints, to catch fire, to become part of the conflagration that extends throughout the breadth and length and height and depth; to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that fills us with the utter fullness of God?

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[1] The Lord Lieutenant, the Lord or Lady Mayor along with all the other invited guests, dressed in full regalia, are seated in the choir; many religions are represented among them. At the climax of the service, the choir leads these officials in a procession to her symbolic resting place where a motet is sung, after which all return to place. It is English civil religion at its best; it is at once deeply moving, yet laced with barely-suppressed merriment, the eutrapelia of divine-human play.

[2] When a few weeks ago I heard that the bones of St Thérèse were coming to town, all I could think of was the story of St. Hugh of Lincoln, who took a bite out of a relic of the supposed arm of Mary Magdalene when he was visiting her shrine at Fécamp. Simon Jenkins' article in the September 17 Guardian, recounts this story among others, and is well worth reading for an account of the some of the more outrageous practices religions get up to.

Exploring Silence X

2011-10-15T13:08:00.001-07:00

While the silence tradition was kept alive by a dwindling number of advocates—dissenters (e.g., Quakers, Shakers), humanists, metaphysical poets, hymn writers and, in the twentieth century, by figures such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil—for mainline Christianity it was lost. Silence became alien, even something to be feared. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) remarked, 'Silence is the virtue of fools.' [1] In the next generation, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) in the Pensées would say of the skies, 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.' [2]

The consequences of the loss of the work of silence and especially the silence of the natural world were devastating; we live with them still. Robert Bringhurst notes: 'The cultural prosperity of North America before the colonization arose from the fact that human cultures were sustained within the larger culture, which is nature as a whole. But to those who ran the [residential Native American/First Nations] schools, the integration of humans with their natural environment was not just undesirable, it was evil; it was satanic. The schools, therefore, taught the subjugation of nature as a duty ... the unsustainability of a human-centered system posed no problems for those who ran the residential schools. If they were faithful to their creed, they expected the age of human mastery to give way in its turn to the kingdom of God.' [3] This notion of the kingdom of God is, of course, entirely opposite to what is meant by this phrase in the bible, as the gospels themselves and countless witnesses from the early days of Christianity have testified.

To briefly sum up:

The everyday self-conscious mind has a small capacity. It tends to get caught in feedback loops of its own making. It is full of preconceptions, fixed ideas and images. It is where the imaginary construct we think of as 'self' resides. It is full of noise and subject to emotional storms; it cultivates self-dramatization. Its thoughts are blown around like leaves in a storm. Yet it thinks it thinks it sees clearly; it thinks it is autonomous; it thinks it is in touch with reality. In fact, everything it experiences is distorted and what it thinks is direct perception is interpretation at several removes. All of its experience is interpretation (Cloud, ch. 8; 18/17-23.)

This superficial conceptual mind is not 'bad', merely a mess. It is what is left after beholding is broken—its flow of exchange with the deep mind. Self-consciousness plays a positive role. It is where the human person becomes aware of imagination. Self-consciousness sorts and classifies images and relationships through linear reason; it receives, orders and interprets images and relationships, and all the beauties and wonders of the sensory and material world. But it is paradoxical: it is trying to create a virtual organized world out of chaotic thoughts.

Because of its inherent instability, self-consciousness cannot see the sensory and material world or relationships clearly. It only can create artifacts out of what it receives the deep mind's direct perceptions of reality; it cannot see that reality. To make its contribution useful instead of destructive, its perspective has quite literally to be continually yielded back to and trans-figured in the silence of the deep mind; that is to say, it must continually submit its data to the silence so that its habitual patterns, the way it 'figures things out', can be closer to the deep mind's direct perception of reality, while at the same time helping the deep mind to expand its range. It is only when the self-conscious mind has yielded its constructs to the deep mind that the truth of the person is then given the possibility of unfolding. But as long as the energy and knowledge the self-conscious mind employs is primarily drawn from itself, it tends to selfishness and grandiosity, grabbing everything it can to shore up the house of cards, the illusion it has created which it calls 'life'. [4]

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[1] De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) cited in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
[2]Pascal's Pensés, New York, Dutton, Pensée 206. (Project Gutenberg EBook).
[3] Robert Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology (Counterpoint, 2008).
[4] Cf., Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, (Yale, 2009).

Exploring Silence IX

2011-10-09T00:57:00.000-07:00

If understanding of the work of silence had not been lost, Martin Luther might not have had the crisis that ignited the Reformation fuse already in place, which further inflamed the war of words piled on words that are often received today as meaningless and irrelevant, in part because they have lost any connexion to praxis in terms of the work of silence. It is significant that during this generation Thomas à Kempis wrote his Imitation of Christ, a text that abandons the primary Christian goal of beholding (onyng with God) for '. . . an appeal made for a practical asceticism in the hope of a more submissive alignment of the initiate's own will with that of the Creator' [1] —the definition of the Creator's will being reserved to the institution.

Luther's crisis was provoked in part by the mental feedback loops that take over when the language of faith no longer refers to the silence from which it arises and to which it returns. The practical means to free him from his mental prison through the work of silence had been lost. The word 'faith' is key to his theology, but it is now tied to self-conscious claims and interpretations turning on Anfectung. By contrast, in the silence tradition, the word 'faith' gestured towards self-forgetfulness, an infinite opening in trust, a relinquishing of all claims to experience (Cloud, ch. 43; 45/38 - 46/8), the predominantly intransitive verb of the Gospel of John. [2]

Luther cements the shift from the medieval understanding of experience as experiment to one of subjectivism.[3] By the time of the Reformation both Catholic and Protestant theological and spiritual strictures have cut off the circulation between speech and silence. Spiritual praxis is officially confined to an often extravagant devotionalism, and to the distortions of self-consciousness. Rome demands assent to dogmatic formulas, conformity in observance, and good works as an act of will, a kind of objectifying performance art, as opposed to an overflowing of the mind of Christ. The work of silence is replaced by credulity, which is the opposite of faith. Luther's approach and that of most other Protestants was fiercely and determinedly experience-based in the sense of subjectivity and self-authentication.

Both Catholicism and Protestantism had become stuck in the merely conceptual, sensory and circular world of the self-conscious mind; both failed to help those who sought, with Langland's Will, the way to 'kynde knowyng' for which he persistently asked, which is found in the deep mind. Both cultivated attitudes of minds-cut-off-from-bodies, disregard for the natural world, and an abysmal Christian anthropology.

--------

[1] E.E.S. Lotz, Secret Rooms: Private Spaces for Private Prayer in Late Medieval Burgundy and the Netherlands, unpublished DPhil Thesis, Oxford University, 2005. The 'alignment' to which the submission is made is entirely controlled by the images and rote practices prescribed by the institution. By the 15th century continental Carthusians had long since succumbed to patronage and penetration by the rich and royal. (p. 117) As policies developed at a glacial rate in the Order, the process must have begun much earlier. By the 14th century the Carthusians seem also largely to have abandoned the Desert ideal of apophatic prayer for the sort of pious devotions that nurtured what was to become Devotio moderna. Lotz points out (p.201) that by the 15th century they were abandoning the goal of the more difficult imageless prayer and generating popular devotional sentimentality, which is exactly what Carthusian life supposedly seeks to discourage.

[2] This insight derived from a lecture by Judith Lieu given in the Oxford University Classics department in the autumn of 2006.

[3] There have been some recent attempts to 'justify' integrating these two mutually exclusive approaches to 'experience'. These seem invariably to end in solipsism, e.g., Steven Chase: 'Finally, one could choose to employ exclusively a modernist methodology of positivism striving for "objective discrimination" and "objective" and "value-free" research in an attempt to uncover the truth" about the past. But why should one want to do so? A larger human capacity is the ability to distinguish (that is, to "objectively discriminate") and to synthesize at the same time (that is, the capacity to search out the "truth" in the context of one's own experience, training, attitudes, politics and spirituality). Of course the study of the history of Christian theology and spirituality is in part an academic discipline, but such a study is not lessened by a scholar who meditates, nor is it forbidden to him, especially if the text is concerned with meditation and contemplation as Richard's is. I do not believe such a practice either valorizes the art of the academic study of religion or subjects it to dangerous reductionistic tendencies; rather, the practice increases the risk of a life lived within an ethical centre . . . Thus as a final methodology, this book will incorporate the writer's own experience of mediating on and contemplating the ark and cherubim.' Angelic Wisdom: The cherubim and the Grace of Contemplation in Richard of St Victor, Notre Dame, 1995, pp. xviii-xix. The problem is that Richard's text, like The Cloud of Unknowing, demands precisely the progressive relinquishing of all reflexivity and claims to experience (interpretation). See section 2 of this paper. Chase's coda at the end of his book exposes the problem, first contradicting Richard's apophatic refusal to name the centre by calling it 'experience', and then making shift or confusion of the meaning of contemplation with something more resembling Walter Hilton's anti-apophatic definition of the word. After telling us that 'Richard's center is celestial. Bonaventure's center will be the Passion. . . [he is wrong about Bonaventure, for whom the Passion is an image for moving into apophatic silence at the centre (see ch. 7)] Richard will not name the center [because it is not experiential] . . . Richard's invitation is for you likewise to experience [what Richard precisely did not 'experience']. . . Beyond Richard's teaching for the weaving of the ark and cherubim in the heart, there is still your own personal experience, your own vision of God, your own touching, thinking, reason, meditation, contemplation, even ecstasy beyond symbol.' pp. 140-141. Bracketed comments are mine.

Autumn

2011-10-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

Autumn shouldered summer aside and blustered into Oxford, spitting rain sideways, as the remnants of Ophelia shredded themselves over the British Isles. This past weekend the temperature made 85 degrees F.; today we will be lucky if it makes 60 degrees F., and there is a scattering of snow across the high Scottish mountains. Wind gusts to 40 mph and higher have a winter's edge as they chuff great piles of cumulus down the length of Britain from the NW, white and grey in the slanting yellow light against a washed out blue.

Cosmos, marigolds, nasturtiums and runner beans have valiantly held on in the very small garden, but pumpkins were brought in weeks ago to cure, and the tomato plants have given up. There remain a few courgettes in big pots sporting futile flowers. On Tuesday, tubers from the dahlias started from seed last spring were put to sleep for the winter in a box in the north room—the nick of time, it felt. Another two weeks and bulbs go in, followed by the aquilegias and lupines, also grown from seed, that have been nurtured all summer. Or what we were pleased to call summer! Virginia creeper, an import beloved of the English, cascades scarlet and burgundy down the back wall, and the mellow stone walls of many of the colleges.

But for all this beauty and bounty, and in spite of my deep gratitude for being here, always in autumn I am drawn in memory to the American West:

" This past week [October, 1985] as I drove across southern Utah and Wyoming, the high peaks were already coated with white. The plateaus lay empty but for the skeletal snow fences, waiting for the storms to bury their bones, and the howling blizzard to sing their Dies Irae. They seemed vast and lifeless. Their cattle had been shipped in long lines of hurrying trucks and railroad cars; the few head kept for breeding had been brought down from the high country to shelter near barns stacked to the ridgepoles with hay. Stubble lay harsh and bleached under the angled autumn sun, and all the land lay quiet as it waited for the snow that soon would blanket its every feature, freeze its fertility until another spring.

"As the miles passed I couldn’t help thinking of our selves as that stripped prairie: our selves searched out and known by God, a sense of exposure and potential futility; sometimes, even, a sense that all that was once familiar and sweet is frozen, as we near despair that another spring will come when our service will take more tangible, visibly fruitful forms.

"But it is within this very winter of our lives that we learn to know Christ our Sun rising on each day of our willingness to use our tears to light the divine fire upon the earth, our tears which fall drop by drop upon our hearts like sparks in the stubble; tears that melt our hearts and thus enable the Spirit’s pouring out through us, anointing the earth.

"Often it doesn’t feel that way. Often we see our debility, our illnesses, our powerlessness to avert tragedy, our ageing as useless when in fact these are the times when we are offered an opportunity to render the most service by our willing powerlessness, our willingness to allow God to empty us of the self-consciousness that remains, now that the noise and distraction of activity is stilled. . . .

"Thus when we think of service, let us first think of this service of willingness, not willingness to do but willingness to be done to, to be handed over, to not know, to let go control, to be emptied so that we may be fulfilled and become the healing power of God on earth and in time.

"We need not be in a state of physical incapacity: it is vital that we understand that we enter this willingness each time we hush the noise without and within us, and are still before God in wordless prayer, in the silence that wells up from our hearts and from which we learn to speak and to do."

—From a sermon given at Holy Apostles Church, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Lacking Nothing

2011-10-01T04:40:00.000-07:00

We hear certain bible passages so often that we can't really hear them any longer. Or so it seems: in fact, sometimes they slip down into the deep mind, gathering new life, and then, if we are open, listening, and lucky, they rise up and stun us with light when we are least expecting it.

Thus it was last week with Mark 10:21. I was on retreat, sitting in my room, playing computer Mahjong. [Gentle Reader, you may be shocked, but it's a great way to help a badly over-taxed brain shift into neutral—and now I realise, as well, that the pair-matching can be a symbolic request to the deep mind to make connection]. As so often happens, the insight came in a blinding flash. Then, while I was still trembling, was further shocked when the passage was read out loud at the next Office: '... one thing you lack ... '

What the rich young man lacked was precisely nothing; no thing was what he needed most, whether physically material or intellectually/spiritually material. It is no accident that this passage follows immediately on the saying, 'Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it', for little children have not yet lost the capacity to live in beholding.

Mark 10:21 is one of those passages that can be read at every level, one that continues to unfold more and more deeply until it effaces itself, leaving the reader in silence.

At the most obvious level, as long as the rich young man was preoccupied with his possessions, his power, his status, his fawning friends, he could not hit the road and follow Jesus—he had to stay home and manage his affairs; nor could he listen to what Jesus was saying, the words that lead to deeper silence. Most of all, he could not follow in Jesus' way, that of beholding, for Jesus points continually away from himself to the kingdom of heaven, which he quite specifically notes is beholding (in Luke 17:21, as well as John 14 and in many other passages).

This rich young man has kept the law, he has moral discipline, he has purified himself; it's not as if Jesus has to start with him from scratch. But the young man clings to religious law in the same way he clings to his possessions and his influence. The temptation to materialise religion is always with us, whether we are attempting to reify it into something we can watch ourselves doing, or, to put this process in Iain McGilchrist's context (form follows function), to shift away from the predominance of the speechless, open, global, inclusive and directly perceiving right hemisphere, where religious perceptions and interpretations are processed; to the predominance of the talkative, linear, two-dimensional, exclusionary, mechanical, repetitive left hemisphere, where the right hemisphere's perceptions are cut down to manipulative size, systematised, distorted, and controlled, which anyone can recognise as the practice of institutions. I am haunted by Changeinthewind's comment on 16/7/11, which sums up so much of the problem of contemporary 'spirituality': 'Perhaps I am trying to build something "spiritual" out of deep mind and doing so is foolish.' How well he/she has stated the problem!

The more I read McGilchrist, the more the current practices of most institutional churches seem mad: all that they do is aimed at, and issues from, the left hemisphere. They turn people into objects. They are preoccupied with numbers of bums in pews and money, or clergy career trajectories, or whether women are fully human. They create banal, two-dimensional translations of the bible and liturgy, and use caterwauling, one-dimensional 'songs' to substitute for the poetry of hymns. These drivelling ditties do not gesture towards the 'nothing', the silence of poetry, but suggest further noise and greater materialisation, which lead not to nothing but to nihilism. This increasing materialisation means also that institutions have jumped on the bandwagon of so-called religious experience. The churches seem to encourage their constituents to go out and consume more experiences, which only locks them deeper in their own illusions; they domesticate and dumb-down; they teach methods of keeping what passes for 'God' for a pet—a pet that is composed of carefully controlled institutional stereotypes. Even so-called worship is no longer directed towards God but towards the worshipper: it's a 'worship experience'.

These practices are not only antithetical to the Gospel, they are counter-productive in terms of helping people to engage God in beholding—which is a right hemisphere activity that leaves the machinations of the left one behind. The people who have abandoned the churches have done so because the churches no longer give them a break from the dehumanizing processes of the left-hemisphere world, but rather impose more of the same. Institutions are far too frightened of what Andrew Shanks has called 'intransigent open-mindedness' (Anglicanism Reimagined: An Honest Church, SCM 2010 p. 15), a notion which is not far from my 'inviolable vulnerability' (Pillars of Flame: Power, Priesthood and Spiritual Maturity, Harper 1988, passim).

Mark 10:21 gives us a classic apophatic double, if not triple, negation: to follow the way of Jesus, physically and/or interiorly, not only does the rich young man need to detach himself from his material wealth; he needs to detach himself from his spiritual materialism of the law. Only by this dispossession can he possess the 'nothing' that is 'all thing'; God is no-thing, as St Paul reminds us, 2 Cor. 6:10; to behold is 'having nothing yet possessing all things'. [Sunday, October 2: Today's reading from Philippians 3 gives a longer exposition of what Paul is talking about.]

If there is one process, one word, that ties together the Old Testament and the New Testament, one unifying link between Jesus and Paul, it is this word 'behold' and the notion of return to beholding the original Word who commands 'behold' (Gen. 1:29; Matt. 28:20), the first word of the original creation that transfigures into the new creation.

There is an echo in Mark 10:21 of Psalm 23:1: 'The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing'. The Hebrew is much simpler than the English, but the rest is implied. The shepherd image is one Jesus frequently uses: to have all that they need, the sheep have only to forget their chronic anxiety and behold the shepherd; they must follow the one who enters through the narrow gate of dispossession, especially of their own anxieties! And as humans, particularly anxieties about God.

This message of lacking nothing to gain all is repeated in other parabolic images: the pearl of great price; the treasure hid in a field; the lost coin; the widow's mite ....

A good liturgy, a silence-filled liturgy, a beauty-filled liturgy, the space between the two fractioned halves of the Host—which echoes the space between the cherubim, the empty tomb, the cave of Elijah, Mary's womb—there is much in the Christian heritage that helps to bring us to this nothing that the institutions have lost.

Religious institutions, like the rich young man, no longer understand what Jesus, 'looking on [them] and loving [them]', is saying. Religious institutions are like the rich young man: not only are they too shocked to take the message on board, but also far too self-regarding; they have too many material, social and political possessions which they seem incapable of abandoning for the one thing necessary, the one thing they lack.

Unlike the rich young man, however, they no longer seem to know even enough to grieve, but shuffle onward, oblivious, into oblivion.

In Memoriam: Wangari Maathai

2011-09-27T02:30:00.000-07:00

What was most distinctive about Wangari Maathai was her warm humanity, a quality that she never lost no matter how famous she became. When she greeted you, you felt as though you had entered a spacious place of peace. She listened with her whole attention; she opened new depths and new horizons simply by engaging you. And there was that smile: a smile that lit up the entire world.

She could have followed the course of so many people from developing areas who, having obtained a Western education, decide to take advantage of more lucrative possibilities in a foreign land. Instead, she went back home, the first woman from her part of the world to earn a doctorate.

Her concern was for the ordinary: water, trees, biodiversity, the coinherent relationship of environment and human well-being and dignity. She encouraged her country-women to collect seeds and to plant millions of trees. She fought irresponsible development, corruption at all levels; she was arrested and beaten for her pains. Her husband divorced her, saying that she was "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control."

The BBC obituary sums up her work as follows:

'Her unique insight was that the lives of Kenyans - and, by extension, of people in many other developing countries - would be made better if economic and social progress went hand in hand with environmental protection ... The straightforward environmental benefits of that would have been important enough on their own in a country whose population has grown more than 10-fold over the last century, creating huge pressure on land and water.

'But what made the movement more remarkable was that it was also conceived as a source of employment in rural areas, and a way to give new skills to women who regularly came second to men in terms of power, education, nutrition and much else.'

She was awarded the Nobel Prize, but for once it was the Nobel panel who was far more honoured than the recipient of their prestigious medal. Through it all she remained Wangari: an African woman, without Western affectations or cynicism.

Plant a tree in her honour; give to a charity that works for the visionary ideas that she fostered.

Her life epitomizes what I think of as sanctity; if anyone deserves an instant place in the calendar of saints it is Wangari Maathai.

On Retreat

2011-09-18T08:55:00.000-07:00

Gentle Readers,

I am going on retreat and will be unavailable for the next week or so. Look for the next post around September 28, 2012.

Blessings,

Maggie

Now Available

2011-09-18T08:48:00.000-07:00

"Maggie Ross clears away the 'white noise' that so often attends writing
and talking about faith. She invites us into real quiet, which is also real
presence, presence to ourselves and to the threefold mystery that
eludes our concepts and even our ordinary ideas of 'experience'.
A really transformative book." —jacket comment by The Most Rev'd Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

"This book is intended for everyone who has had enough of 'spiritual
writing' and is looking for something that will make sense of normal human experience and integrate it into the knowledge of God through Christ." —from the Foreword by The Rev'd Professor John Barton, Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, University of Oxford

Review by The Revd Dr Johnny Douglas, Free Presbyterian Church, Antrim, N. Ireland

If obedience is deep listening to God, then Maggie Ross's new book is a powerful, effective and understated guiding to faith and soul-truthfulness. There is a rarity, freshness in her writing. Insight, scripture, wisdom and prayer swirl around here in this challenging earthy write. You will see God clearly and more honestly than in most other places.  The sense of having wrestled with the wilderness, wanderings and wideness of humanity are striking. Repentance, tears and fire rarely get such a wise and moving exploration. Reality permeates this wonderful new BRF title. Faith and experience will be enriched should you invest in the reading of this fine book!

Review by Carl McColman, www.anamchara.com

Almost twenty years ago I read Maggie Ross’s wonderful book on the theology of priesthood, Pillars of Flame: Power, Priesthood and Spiritual Maturity. Not only was it a valuable book in helping me to affirm my ministry as a lay Christian, but it also struck me as one of the most lyrical and eloquent statements of Christian spirituality in general that I had ever read. Yes, that is high praise. But the book deserved it. Ross, an Anglican solitary, clearly understood how tainted Christian theology had become by imperial, Greco-Roman, concepts of God-as-controlling-political-authority — and how such a domineering image of God had corrupted not only Christian spirituality in general, but particularly Christian thinking about priesthood. Only by regaining an understanding of God-as-kenotic-love, as evidenced by the witness of Christ and the New Testament authors, could we ever hope to re-vision priesthood as the radical servant/ministry that Christ intended it to be.

So when one of the brothers at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit sent me an enthusiastic email insisting that Writing the Icon of the Heart, Ross’s newest offering, was by far one of the most important books on spirituality that he had read in a long time, I took him at his word. And now that I’ve read it, I’m happy to commend it to you as well.The book is a collection of essays Ross had written over a twenty year period, most of which had been published in journals like Weavings or Sobornost. But they have all been revised/rewritten for this collection, and she requests that the essays be read in the order presented here. So what emerges feels less like a hodgepodge anthology and more like a thematic introduction to her singular perspective on what it means to be a contemplative in today’s world, from considering the missing element in so many discussions of contemplation (“beholding”), to a frank but sober assessment of how a spiritual awakening might be our only hope as we consider the breadth and depth of environmental degradation that characterizes today’s world. Ross divides her time between Oxford and Alaska, and so her writing is infused with an appreciation of wilderness, not only for its own sake but also as a key element in an authentically kenotic spirituality.

Ross warns in the introduction of the book against the facile use of the words “mystic” and “mysticism,” and indeed, one of her most consistent targets is the idolatry of experience that characterizes so much spiritual thinking and activity in our day. While I am not willing to be quite as damning in my critique of experience as she is — I see the turn toward experience as a necessary corrective to the overly intellectualized propositional theology that has bedeviled so much Christianity, particulary in its Protestant form, over the past few generations — I broadly agree with her assertion that the quest for experience has become a religious cul-de-sac, reducing Christianity from its splendor as a threshold to the mysteries to a mere consumer spirituality, trading transformational kenosis for mental-emotional entertainment. The Christian mystery takes us far beyond what we can think or feel — to the place of “beholding,” a splendid word that Ross notes has been all but erased from modern translations of the Bible (not to mention most modern translations of the writings of Julian of Norwich and the Cloud of Unknowing, which helps to explain why Ross is so critical of reading those texts in translated editions).

Unlike consumer spirituality where a warm cosy experience of God’s love can be engineered by the right music and a carefully crafted sermon, true contemplative beholding ushers us into radical encounter with the terrifying living God, a place beyond our puny attempts to control and our feeble insistence on good feelings as the arbiter of sanctity. True beholding, therefore, is transfigurative rather than merely experiential — echoing Teresa of Avila’s insistence that the only sure way of assessing progress in the spiritual life is by considering one’s growth in holiness, which is to say, growth in love and humble service of others.

For Maggie Ross, the “others” we are called to love and humbly serve are not merely our fellow Christians or even the larger human family. Rather, she eloquently speaks of the entire sweep of creation as our brothers and sisters in the Divine economy. From cranberries to walruses to a hair-raising near-encounter with a grizzly bear, her essays are vibrant with the beauty and splendor of God’s good earth. She also pulls no punches in considering how much damage our consumer economy has caused. Only by abandoning consumerism and accepting the call of kenosis — of self-emptying love — is there any hope for our fragile and distressed biosphere. And only by beholding God in silence and self-forgetful abandonment can we hope to discern, and accept, that uncompromising call.

In the end, Maggie Ross writes eloquently of the experience of tears — not as some sort of emotional manipulation, as so much religious spectacle seems to promote — but rather as an authentic embracing of sorrow, of loss, of repentance, of grief, of letting-go — that ushers us in to that place, where, in our letting go (kenosis) we encounter the kenotic God. This is the place of transfiguration, beyond any “technology” or “experience,” whether religious or otherwise. May we all be carried by our tears to such a graced encounter.

Note to USA and non-UK buyers:

From ABE (Book Depository--Guernsey) USD 11.85

From Amazon UK: USD 21.15

Exploring Silence VIII

2011-09-15T03:52:00.000-07:00

Having briefly looked at the silence tradition, it is now necessary to spend a few moments reviewing some of the elements that contributed to its decline.

From the beginnings of Christianity—whose trajectory is similar to those of other religions—there is conflict between those wishing to accrue institutional power to themselves, and those gathering for mutual support and thanksgiving for the transfiguration that occurs in the kenotic process of silence, through meeting the Word who is silence. In the second century, those advocating more interior interpretations of the Gospel were anathematized as heretics by institutionally minded bishops, who urged their followers instead toward imitation and martyrdom. [1] Throughout the first millennium of their history, western Christian institutions blew hot and cold, both on the tradition of silence and the guardians of that tradition; for the kenotic work of silence develops incoercible spiritual maturity that is inherently subversive to hierarchies and their claims, as we saw earlier in Jesus' remarks in John 14. [2] This is the freedom of the children of God.

The eleventh century saw a dramatic and fatal shift away from the silence tradition towards imitation, which, however piously meant, is a kind of performance art that creates the sort of self-observing feedback loop that leads to narcissism. [3] It is much more pleasurable to watch oneself playing a part in a grand ceremonial pageant than to turn away from such spectacles towards the invisible and immaterial, humble and hidden even from oneself. To put on the mind of Christ means to forget oneself, to relinquish the contents of self-consciousness—experience, perspective, interpretation, emotion, imaginative stereotypes and projections—into silence, so that the mind may be sprung from the trap of its own circular thinking. [4] In terms of the chart in your handout, the centre from which self-consciousness takes its energy moves from the left side into liminality, where, by intention ('nakid entente') it engages with the right side.

By contrast to this kenotic process, to imitate is to pursue a life based on imaginative stereotypes and projections, which are easily formed and insinuated by a controlling hierarchy. Its attention is reflexive. Imitation causes the mind to be stuck on the left side (Cloud ch. 19, 28/14-15); the depths of the riches of the knowledge of God that reside in hidden silence are unavailable to it. To exert more control over people's interior lives is one of the strategies behind many of Gregory VII's (†1085) reforms that sought to centralize Christianity in Rome and to extend the political power of the papacy. This renewed conflict between putting on the mind of Christ and institutionally controlled imitation, between contemplation and dialectic, is symbolized by the ironic coincidence of the dates 1084-1085, which are the marker dates for the foundation of the Carthusians and the translation of Aristotle, respectively.

Over the next three centuries, tensions rose to the breaking point between a political camp that used words as weapons under the guise of dialectic and sought to freeze doctrine into formulas, and a 'spiritual' camp that insisted that familiarity with the silence from which words spring and to which they refer must not be lost, that dialectic is to be used in service of silence. The deaths of Aquinas and Bonaventure in 1274 mark the end of a scholastic theology that sought this balance between silence and speech. [5]

The efflorescence of contemplatives at the end of the thirteenth- and throughout the fourteenth centuries was in part a protest movement against institutional totalitarianism, the pursuit of analysis and definitions, and its claims at the expense of 'kynde knowyng'. [6] The hierarchy became increasingly threatened by any speech about silence that did not fit accepted formulas: Holy Church tells Will to be 'trewe of his tongue' and to obey the law and then he will know God, an inversion of what he asks and of what the ancient silence tradition—and neuro-science—understood as the way human beings function. [7] The Inquisition was authorised first in 1179, renewed in 1199 and finally established in 1231, the beginning, one might say, of the Counter-Reformation before the Reformation. [8]

Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake in 1310 because she refused to conform her accurate psychological description of the work of silence to pious cliché. She could not in truth conflate two radically different and in many ways conflicting epistemologies in terms of the merely conceptual and reflexive; she could not deny that the Church had cut itself adrift from its incarnational foundation. She would not submit to the debaters of the age. She declined to defend herself—how could someone who had never done the work of silence possibly know what she was talking about?—and in silence went to the flames. [9]
One cannot help but be struck by the way Porete used her life her life to invert the meaning of 'imitation', which ordinarily manifested 'the weary conventions of contemporary passion poetry'. [10] She incarnates putting on the mind of Christ: as his life and thought threatened the temple system, so her life and thought threatened the church—and for similar reasons, the clash between rigid exterior observance and supple interior life. As he was provocative, so was she; as he was silent before his accusers, so she was silent before hers.

The flames that consumed Porete lit a warning beacon to which the writings of some—Meister Eckhart,the Cloud-author and Julian of Norwich—but not all, of the fourteenth-century contemplatives were, in part, a response. But by 1310 when Porete was burned the game was already lost and by 1464 when Nicholas of Cusa died, it was over. It did not take even a generation for the last vestiges of the work of silence to be lost to institutional Christianity. Luther's prior and teacher, Johann von Staupitz was born in 1460, four years before Cusa's death, and it is clear from his writings on rapture, ecstasy and excessus mentis that while he certainly read earlier authors in the group we are concerned with, he did not seem to understand that excessus mentis in their texts referred to an actual process. In fact, he felt free to redefine them, as Hilton seventy-five years earlier had felt free to redefine contemplation in the course of his support of the institution, [11] a process Luther would carry even further in his break from it. [12] When Luther co-opted these 'rapture', 'ecstasy' and excessus mentis into the service of a theology extrapolated from self-authenticating experience as opposed to experimental praxis, they became dead leaves floating on a dark and contentious lake.

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[1] See, for example, Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, New York, Viking, 2007. For a similar point of view coming from a completely different starting point, see also Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving Paradise, Boston, Beacon, 2008. This latter book has an excellent discussion of the profound impact on Western Christianity of the need of Charlemagne and his successors to justify—to spin, theologically—the slaughter of Saxons and the consequent development of sacrifice/atonement theology.

[2] It is not that contemplatives necessarily are in opposition to the Church; they write what they write because they love it and are loyal to it, and wish to offer a corrective. The problem more often comes from the side of the institution, not from the contemplative.

[3] It should be noted that the rise of the devotion to the humanity of Christ, which became a brickbat of orthodoxy, is a humanity without a mind. It is spiritually useful as an aid to understanding Phil. 2:5-11 (as in Julian's Showings; or PC 89/41- 90/7; 91/7-13; or Walsh's Cloud note 142, quoting Guiges du Pont, '. . .his concentration must be the Godhead rather than the humanity. He must take hold of God by the handle of his humanity, and embrace rather the feet of God', p. 156). But used as an end in itself it undermines the Philippians passage, on which Christianity turns, evidenced, for example, by its centrality in the Holy Week liturgy. See, for example, The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience: The Role of the Humanity of Jesus by Paul Mommaers, [SJ] Leuven, Peeters, 2003. Walsh's note 72 cites Gallus quoting I Peter 4:1 but it is more likely he is quoting the Philippians passage, '"Christ having suffered in the flesh, you must arm yourselves with a mind like his . . . the mysteries of the divine humanity are like a ladder which brings us up to the contemplation of the divinity"'. (Explanation on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, chap. III.) Walsh, p. 172.

[4] This practice bestows greater objectivity than linear ratiocination. See below.

[5] Chartres cathedral is an architectural example of this balance. See the excellent discussion in Philip Ball's Universe of Stone (New York: Harper, 2008). See also the discussion in the shift in theology in Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, translated from the Middle English with an introduction and notes by John P.H. Clark and Rosemary Dorward, Paulist Press, 1991, p. 28.

[6] This tension spilled over into the margins of manuscripts, particularly between the years 1250 and 1330, and even into the 15th century. See appendix.

[7] 'Langland's "Kynde Knowyng"', p. 242. There is a tantalizing parallel in recent research that shows that human decisions are made out of our sight before we become aware of them.

[8] McGinn states: 'It must be noted that there was never any institution as "the Inquisition" in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the application of the inquisitional method (i.e., a legal procedure in which the judge was the acuser), on both the episcopal and papal level, was important for the history of the relation between mysticism and magisterium. Although the de iure rights of heretical inquisitors did not generally differ from those of other inquisitional judges, in practice (de facto), heretical trials became a special world. '"Evil-Sounding, Rash, and Suspect of Heresy": Tensions Between Mysticism and Magisterium in the History of the Church' by Bernard McGinn, The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. XC, April 2004, No. 2, pp. 193-212', p. 211, note 50.

[9] According to McGinn, Porete's work '. . .circulated in four languages during the later Middle Ages, [but] it was subsequently lost to history until 1946. . .' '"Evil-Sounding, Rash, and Suspect of Heresy"', p. 196. It is easy to see why: institutional suppression of the work of silence on the Continent became draconian, as John van Engen's work on Alijt Bake demonstrates. In response to her renewed practice of the work of silence, which she introduced to the Sisters of the Common Life, the Windesheim General Chapter in 1455, having removed her as prioress and driven her from the cloister (she soon died) decreed: 'No nun or sister of whatever status should copy books containing philosophical teachings or revelations, either themselves or by way of others, whether compositions of their own (ex suo propria mente) or of other Sisters, and this on pain of imprisonment. If someone hears of or sees such books, he should cast them into the fire; nor should anyone presume to translate such books from Latin into Dutch.' Unpublished translation used by permission.

[10] 'Apophatic Image', p. 61.

[11] That Hilton saw contemplation as reserved to the elite few suggests that he was either unfamiliar with the model the Cloud-author is using or that he chose to ignore it. The Cloud-author and Hilton appear to share much in their approaches to ecclesiology and the lower reaches of the spiritual life, but in terms of the higher reaches of contemplation they appear to be fundamentally different. '. . . "reforming in feeling,"[is] something to which every Christian should aspire, whatever his or her state in life. This is part of a shift in the understanding of what actually constitutes "contemplation"'. Walter Hilton (Classics of Western Spirituality), p. 19. In fact, Hilton is trying to prevent people from the full extent of the practice described in the Cloud.

[12] See 'Religious Ecstasy in Staupitz and the Young Luther' by David C. Steinmetz Sixteenth Century Journal XI. No. 1 (1980) pp. 23-37. It is also true that these three words had often been freely used without being tied to particular definitons: ecstasis, for example, could just as well refer to a the Delphic oracle in ancient Greece as the suspension of self-consciousness. Seventy-five years earlier in England, Walter Hilton had begun to change the meaning of contemplation.

Let Us Pray

2011-09-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

— For the 3,000 people killed on 9/11 and those who killed them

— For more than 50,000 people killed in Afghanistan since 9/11

— For more than 2,000,000 people killed in Iraq since 9/11

— For the persecuted Christians in Iraq

— For the persecuted Muslims in America

— For an end to this senseless slaughter.

2011-09-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

A Layby for the Dead

2011-09-08T11:07:00.001-07:00

It was doomed before it began, and the greatest tragedy is that the people whom it has most affected knew even as it was proposed how horrible it would be, but were powerless to stop the crass machinations of the government.

The repatriations through Wooton Bassett were deeply moving and appropriate for many reasons, but one in particular is worth looking at. The hearses passed through the centre of town, through the ordinary lives of of ordinary people: their businesses, shops, pubs, homes. The response was spontaneous for any number of reasons, the primary one being that when death passes through your life you pay attention.

On repatriation days, people put down their daily tasks as people do when strangers appear bearing the burden of grief. They opened their dwellings and their lives and offered what they could: food, drink, comfort, respect, their tears. Then, when the procession had passed, they themselves could take some comfort in turning back to what they had set aside to resume living—grieving, changed, but within the fabric of their ordinary round and familiar places: death and life were all of a piece.

This display of compassion and solidarity got up the government's nose, of course, so the government had to spoil it. They built a sterile 'memorial garden' in the middle of nowhere. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is a lay-by for the dead. The repatriation procession no longer passes through people's ordinary lives. There is no possibility of taking the warm scones from the aga, through the front door, to be given into the hands of strangers.

No, it's all artificial now: you have to do the baking and cool the scones and box them up and put them in the car and drive miles into the middle of nowhere for an artificial gathering at an artificial site where everything is contrived and controlled and boring as hell; where everyone is dislocated, out of their patch, awkward and uncomfortable, knowing nobody: nobody's home, nobody's shop, nobody's pub, nobody's nothing. Children can't participate on their way home from school; old people must stay away if they can't drive. This shift away from Lyneham and Wooton Bassett is a callous and deliberate calculation on the part of the government to dehumanize not only those who have died but also those who mourn, to render them helpless, to make it as difficult as possible for people to honour the dead, in hopes the movement will just die out and disappear. It is the government's effort to sanitize death, to hide it, particularly to hide the human cost of a ghastly war, and to remove the last vestige of a sense of village and community from the process.

No one is fooled; how stupid does the government think people are?

The rest of us who are in solidarity with the Wooton Basset movement can only grieve for what cold comfort this new venue must be to the families of the dead, grieve for those other mourners who once took the soldiers and their families to their hearts as the procession passed through homes and shops and settled lives, mourners who are now stuck with planning, organising and commuting to the 'memorial garden', a banal, inauthentic, inappropriate, sterile layby for the dead.

Savour the Days

2011-09-07T03:59:00.000-07:00

Oxford has shifted from late summer to early autumn with amazing rapidity. Friday was blissful: a friend had the idea to hire a Canadian canoe for four hours. On the Thames, water and wind were quiet; honeyed light angled through the trees and brush.

Few people were about and fewer boats, though traffic increased as the day unfolded. We had no sooner left the waterside park than we passed a series of ancient stone quays: circular steps, mooring space, a place for a grand barge overhung with willow and crusted with age. Ghosts of Regency ladies and gentleman laughed and swirled in the shadows. Anyone and anything could have emerged from the radiance behind the weeping branches. Magical doesn't even begin to describe it. Eventually we tore ourselves away and in silence dipped our paddles against the gentle current: we were Ratty and Mole consorting with the god Pan.

We idled upstream for a couple of hours in the languorous warmth, a little breeze cooling our exertions, visited by heron and doves, and once the flash and rattle of a kingfisher. At the confluence of the Thame we stopped and ate our picnic, talking little about not much and reveling in the ephemeral day.

Too soon we packed up and began the float home, letting the current play with us—until we realized we were uncertain of our time and, for the last mile or so, poured on the power, in the end arriving promptly, wishing we'd had more time.

What a difference a day makes: the weekend was cold and cloudy; Monday the showers began to blast through, and yesterday brought a full blown autumn gale: 86 mph clocked at The Needles on the Isle of Wight. Outside my window it was, quite literally, raining sideways.

Today the rain has cleared off and the wind abated but there is no question that the year is winding down. Children and parents began the new school year this morning, and scholars have begun to trickle into the Bodleian. There is a sense of gearing up for term, the quiet desperation of o-my-god-here-we-go-again as new undergraduates come in and exhausted DPhil candidates prepare to submit their theses and face their vivas.

Monday and Tuesday the St Giles Fair was in town. On the way to the cathedral Monday morning, everything was still quiet. It was a typical English fun-fair, rather down at heel, making no effort to disguise but rather revelling in its own flimflam. Garish wagons and thrill rides, rows of stalls selling what passes for food—all somehow crowded into St Giles with military efficiency, a feat remarkable in its own way, but somehow ineffably sad.

Mercifully the only sounds that invaded the silence of our neighbourhood the last two nights were the background static of generators and an occasional voice reverberating from a tannoy turned to maximum amplification. This morning, except for one articulated blank-sided lorry, the fair had vanished, the trash had been swept—only the reek of urine on the pavement from St Giles' church to Mary Mag's marked its passing. At St John's college the gardeners were sweeping up leaves stripped from branches in yesterday's storm. Sitting here in the Upper Reading Room, now, as I write, faint incense of woodsmoke seeps through the mullioned windows.

Our little garden at the house survived the storm, though foliage is somewhat battered, exposing orange and red pumpkins, green tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans, all rushing to mature before frost. The apple tree and the pear tree are laden with fruit, the apples tangy and crisp at this early stage of ripeness, soon to turn yellow and sweet.

Autumn ... days slipping by too fast, too fast. . .

Comment Worth Foregrounding

2011-09-03T01:49:00.000-07:00

BR writes:

Looking forward to reading the book. Your mention is a good excuse to ask the question I've been meaning to:

We agree that religion is a mess. And the story you've told from Pillars of Flame to Writing the Icon to this blog has resonated for me. But what to do about, well, church?

I ask because I've been out of church for years, and am moving to a new city. So I want to ground myself in faith again, find some people, and find something beyond silent prayer and reading heady theology in my garret. Yet I have little idea what to do. With your work, religion is rooted in silence, and I won't find that in almost any American church. Pillars of Flame suggests the whole enterprise is mad. I understand this, but I also can't bear to go it alone much more. Impossible to answer such a question for a stranger, I know, but thank you for your time and your work.

To BR

Thank you for writing, for your kind remarks, and for asking this very difficult question.

You give voice to what many of us feel, myself included. People like us don't wish to be apart from the community, but there is no community to be part of, not only in America, but in a lot of other places. Having said that, it may offer a modicum of comfort to know the following:

Last year Blogger—unbeknownst to me—put a counter on this blog, which, being a techno-dork, I only recently discovered. I was dumbfounded to learn that in the last 14 months there have been just under 40,000 hits from more than 77 countries, and, judging from the search information, these are not random accidents but intentional.

So, weirdly, those of us who feel as you do and find themselves in the same dilemma are numerous, but we have no way to form a community except this ephemeral one in the ether, a community of solitudes. This is only to offer cold comfort, but you are not alone.

I wish I had something helpful to say. I can only tell you what I do. I've sampled many of the churches in Oxford and the only one that is bearable is the cathedral. Of course there is no community there in the sense that the English don't do that in the way that Americans think of it—not that I ever was able to be a part of any American parish community, either. And then there is the English class system and the rest of it. In addition, there's something about people like us who understand about religion and silence that sets off everyone else's alarm bells, especially those of the clergy. What makes it worse is that a lot of the clergy know we're offering something they need to look at.

I can't tell you how many times a vicar or rector has said to me, 'I know you're right, but I could never do that in my parish'. This of course says volumes about the disdain in which the clergy hold their congregations, their reluctance to give up micro-managing, and also the fact that they don't want to expend the enormous amount of energy it would take to figure out how changes could be implemented—the most effort being the need to realise how they come across and to change their own attitudes. If they would listen to the laity and look in the mirror the laity are holding up, they might be pleasantly surprised and discover that there is far less effort in letting go the wrong kind of control.

At the cathedral there are several canons who understand the need for silence but they are caught up by their context and have this dreadful liturgical book—Common Worship—that they have to use. They also are stuck with the mostly cack-handed NRSV ("the sound of sheer silence" in the story of Elijah is one of the few strokes of genius). I don't understand the ins and outs of English canon law; there is freedom of choice but also draconian restrictions on when those choices can be exercised. And of course the congregation is inherently conservative.

Anyway, I try to go weekdays for the 7:15 AM Matins and the Eucharist. I go early to have time to sit in quiet. Sometimes one or two of the canons are there, too. But, to say we are community would be rather stretching it. Being a cathedral, and particularly an English cathedral, and particularly an Oxford cathedral, there is an even greater gulf fixed between the clergy and laity than normally obtains. Having said that, the cathedral clergy here have an unusual level of humanity, and the cathedral is a far more welcoming place than other churches in Oxford I have sampled.

This situation can't be helped; it's the nature of Oxford, and those who are both canons and full-time academics are all under tremendous pressure and need to protect themselves. American academics who come here are shocked at how hard Oxford academics work. I try to be silently supportive and sympathetic (except on occasions like last Thursday morning), but in fact, I have reached the point, now, where I am in fact glad of the gulf: as far as the institution goes, I don't want to be caught up in a hopeless and deluded situation—as you put it, 'the whole enterprise is mad'; I don't want my vision clouded with upset; I am reconciled with my exile, although that doesn't mean it is ever comfortable, and I'm quite sure that Christianity is most definitely not about being comfortable.

To complicate matters, the cathedral clergy know what I have written so that even if there are those who are sympathetic, they keep their distance. Although it was not my intention at the time—I was too new and naïve then to know how things work in Oxford—the temerity of writing a book like Pillars of Flame while living within the walls of an institution that has produced thirteen archbishops of Canterbury, John and Charles Wesley, etc. etc. etc. has left its mark of Cain, as it were.

At the same time, although it is painfully hard, I have been encouraged by more than one bishop to go to church precisely because my merely being there makes the situation uncomfortable. It's an aspect of my life I wish weren't there but I have no choice. How this came about is a tale unto itself not to be told at this point in time; it is not a role I sought but rather one that the dark underbelly of Oxford wished on me: a classic example of the fearful creating exactly what was most feared.

Long ago I realised that for all practical purposes the church that was the context thirty-two years ago when I was professed is dead. Nonetheless I go weekdays because I miss the monastic Office (especially the Night Office) and it's one way to dribble a little balm into that wound. (Monasticism, too, is dead; for all practical purposes, what is left is, for the most part, form without content.) I try to immerse myself in the Office and shut out all the rest. Or if the rest intrudes, I tell myself that it is good for me to go weekday mornings at least for the exercise (it's a two mile walk round trip), and that it's a painless way to keep the internal concordance alive, which I need to do for my research. Or if all of these rationalisations fail (as they did on Thursday), I skip a couple of days so that I don't get too depressed.

On Sundays during Term I go for the music, pure and simple—and also to people-watch, trying to fathom how other people cope with this dilemma. I know that there are many, many other people who feel as we do because in a critical meeting some years ago, a rare occasion on which I was permitted to lament all of these problems, I was, of course, challenged. The challenger called on the diocesan ombudsperson to contradict me, but she told the challenger that what I was saying was exactly the way ordinary people in the pews feel. That was twenty years go; things have become much worse. But people seem feel that the situation is hopeless, that there's no point in trying to address the entrenched status quo. I have a friend who has been doing clergy evaluations for the diocese for many years and she is quitting for precisely this reason.

Outside of term, on Sundays, I go to 8 o'clock at Mary Mag's, depending on who is celebrating. If it is someone who is intrusive instead of effacing, then I check out who is preaching elsewhere and try at least to find a good sermon. The cathedral has some preachers I will go especially to hear, which means I might go to two or three services on a Sunday.

I suppose I am getting ever more picky in my old age, but old age makes one more aware of silence. I can't stand folksy liturgy; I hate it when a deeply misguided organist drops the hymns by a third so we are all growling around at the level of the natural break in the voice; few people are trained singers with a seamless and comfortable passagio. We need to reach for the head tones as well as the chest tones to accomplish what hymns set out to do. I like full-blown liturgy and the smell of incense; I just don't like what far too often goes with it and spoils it: the posturing, the poncing, the preening, the noses in the air, the infantilizing of the congregation.

Unfortunately the rule that the squeaky wheel gets greased does not seem to apply to the churches; as you know, clergy do not listen to laity. It seems as though there are two classes of people to which the institution pays attention: in general the clergy pay attention to themselves as an in-group, and to those whom they patronizingly classify as 'the poor'. The rest of us, the majority, give the term 'the excluded middle' a whole new set of meanings. We're tolerated only for body counts and money. In the face of these attitudes, while it may seem like beating one's head against a brick wall, it is nonetheless worth suggesting alternatives to the clerics, recommending books, theologizing—and you will know soon enough if you are dealing with the sort of clergy who don't want input. A friend of mine was recently called obstructive and disruptive by her rector for simply participating in a bible discussion and departing from the script. The levels of conformity that American culture now demands are absolutely frightening.

In my own situation in the UK there are little flickers of hope here and there. Rowan Williams is one. Oxford has at least two very good bishops (I don't know the other area bishops) who are sympathetic to the problems but are also hampered by clergy attitudes, the very noisy and intransigent closed-minded evos, not to mention the other cultural difficulties peculiar to England. Another sign of hope comes from the growing interest in Iain McGilchrist's work on brain hemispheres (The Master and His Emissary), which eventually could be useful in showing how various doctrines and practices and developments in the church appeal to the side of the brain that does not have the tools for 'religion' in the sense of a sense of opening to real spiritual maturity, to what is unknown, the part of the brain that processes layered language and metaphor, symbol and ritual and so forth. The work of Andrew Shanks also holds out hope, although in my opinion he is far too optimistic about the possibility of changing the attitudes of the clerical status quo, though I applaud him for trying.

In terms of the USA, however, I am now so far removed from the American church—by choice—that I don't know what to say. I do know of a few, a very few, clergy and others who are swimming upstream, but they can be counted on one hand. It may or may not be significant that the book I published here in the UK in May—and which is selling very well—has not yet found a publisher in the USA, where only formula books, self-help and established pop spirituality authors seem to get published these days. Of course there's the excuse of the economy and publishers are running scared. But it's more than that. Fortunately enough people in the UK are still open to critical thinking on these matters and people here still read books.

I spent seven months in the USA last year running a chapel at a retreat centre, meeting hundreds of people from all over the country. It was an alarming experience because of the mindset that kept reappearing, and a set of cultural parameters that spoke of an increasing divergence between the blinkered way even educated Americans seem to interpret the world, and the way the British and Europeans do; the difference in goals and values. (Perhaps symptomatic was the group of Americans this past summer, who rented a house one street over from ours here in Oxford—they have now, mercifully, departed. Their noise levels, ordinary conversations as well as frequent parties, disturbed the entire neighbourhood at all hours of the day and night; their loud, penetrating voices woke everyone in the middle of the night when they walked back from the pub. It was their complete obliviousness to their impact on the surrounding community that was all too believable and, from an English point of view, inexcusable—but they're Americans, so what are you going to do?)

The bottom line is that those of us who are in the same boat with you have to do the best we can in our individual situations and contexts. It's pointless, however, to go to church and come away angry and depressed. The institution may deplore church-shopping but in the end that's what you have to do. Since institutional Christianity decided to be a business it can't expect its 'customers' not to respond accordingly. It may be that you will not be able to find any community of the sort you are looking for—in which case you will need to decide if you can settle for what is least offensive, or if you will have to continue your exile and mourning in your garret—and yes, the sense of isolation and loneliness is unbearable, whether or not one has found a place of worship one can stomach.

I suppose my basic attitude is that I know it's over, it's finished, and that in the end this may be a good thing, but the losses will be incalculable, not just cultural and scholarly ones, but what it means to be a human person. Even though I know I am probably whipping a dead horse, I keep on writing (thanks to the encouragement of people like you and the readers of this blog) and on the very rare occasions I am invited to do so, speaking up about what Christianity once was, is not now, and what it could be. Even the most oblivious cleric does not like to be bitten by a mosquito. I am impelled by the knowledge of centuries of Christians who have been cheated of their spiritual birthright, and even more by the spiritual suffering I see all around me. But of course this means I will always be in exile. If that is the price, so be it.

It's with this painful detachment that I simply go on doing what I know I have to do to be open to the peace of God—which, as the hymn reminds us, is 'strife closed in the sod'. Like so many other aspects of life, it's a matter of finding the balance. What, realistically, will feed your life in God?

Brief and Banal

2011-09-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

This morning at Matins and the Eucharist, whoever was supposed to preside didn't show up, so we were running late. The person who filled in announced at the Eucharist that we would use prayer H and ordered everyone to look at their booklet and make the responses. Since I don't ever use a booklet (it's all in my memory) this seemed a bit ad feminam but I dutifully picked up a booklet (I always sit in the back) and opened to canon H.

Rather an interesting structure, entirely in dialogue form: as I recall, two prefatory calls and response, the consecration prayers (bread, cup) each with a response, the whole thing ending with the Sanctus and then communion. It would have been intriguing if a) the language hadn't been so utterly banal that halfway through I put my booklet down and refused to mouth any more of this drivel; and b) if the theology hadn't been the worst sort of bloody sacrifice atonement nonsense that was pure Paschasius and his successors (more on this in a moment); and c) if it had been short not because we were pressed for time but because we could have been spending time together in silence in a genuinely contemplative Eucharist.

All of these negatives were exacerbated for me because I have been reading Rachel Fulton's most wonderful book, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200, (Columbia University Press, 2002). This is one of the sources that Brock and Parker used for Saving Paradise and it is not only beautifully written, but also a very even-handed and subtle analysis of Paschasius' argument and what followed. She is not as blunt as Brock and Parker in describing the effects, but Brock and Parker are certainly justified in what they say. I have come to rephrase one of the questions rather crudely as, "How did we switch from understanding salvation as a kenotic putting on the mind of the risen Christ, to understanding it as a solpisistic putting on of the dead body of the historical Jesus?"

Rachel Fulton makes the answer to this question very evident. I cannot say enough good things about her book, from the level of scholarship to the humane presentation. If you really want to know why religion is in such a mess today, read this book.

Who Sneers First Dies First

2011-08-29T01:27:00.000-07:00

There are headlines in this morning's papers sneering at a storm that they claim was more hype than hurricane. Clearly the vultures who write such cant have never been through a major storm, and have little or no understanding of how capricious weather systems can be, even more so now that global warming is turning the weather chaotic and extreme. It is also clear that the people who write these headlines are reincarnations of those who used to attend spectacles in the Roman coliseum, hoping for a five-star bloodbath. Sorry to disappoint you, guys, this time around at any rate.

It is hard to see how a conservative estimate of three billion dollars worth of damage and 23 deaths [as of 10 PM GMT the count has risen to 35] is less than catastrophic for the people who have taken the full brunt of the storm. The enormous amount of rain that fell from this slow-moving weather system is still flowing into rivers vulnerable to flooding. One river in Pennsylvania has already reached levels not seen in 150 years.

It is hard to fault the Obama administration and the New York mayor for prudence, or FEMA for getting ready for an even worse event. As it is, this storm affected the largest number of people of any storm in history. New York had an extremely lucky break: if the winds had not diminished, there could have been far greater damage, not only to low-lying areas from flooding, but also to skyscrapers: wind speed increases geometrically with altitude. Not to mention the funnelling effect of New York's streets: anyone who has lived there, as I have, knows the danger of straight-line winds that can develop in its concrete canyons.

These headlines show the degrading of human mentality to a mechanized view of storms and tides. This alienation from nature is shocking and foolish. Anyone who has lived in an area where life depends on tides and respect for the weather knows how stupid it is to underestimate, to be ill-prepared. Many is the day when I was fishing in Alaska in perfect conditions only to have my interior alarm bells sound; I'd pull the gear and head in, feeling a bit of a fool. Nine times out of ten, however, the wind would start shrieking just as I entered the harbour, leaving my more macho colleagues to face seas that can grow from flat to 10 feet within a couple of minutes.

Tidal surges are also unpredictable, whether or not there is a storm. In Alaska one year, there was a spring tide that just kept coming: it was supposed to be 22 feet; it ended up being 24 or 25 feet. It is possible there had been an undersea landslip, but whatever the cause, it was frightening to stand in total helplessness as the small waves lapped higher and higher up the shingle.

Storms can arise seemingly from nowhere, especially at more northern latitudes. Ask the people of Boscastle or Cumbria. Ask the people who live along the Cornish and Welsh coasts, who live on the islands off of Scotland.

It is incredible that there are still those who doubt the human impact on the planet's weather and climate, who delude themselves about the fragility of ecosystems. Anyone who has lived close to nature knows how inconceivably fragile any ecosystem is. Only slight variations in such factors as temperature, animal birth rates, water availability can set major, often irreversible changes into motion. Anyone who lives in a place like Alaska sees the impact of global warming and the degrading of the environment on a daily basis. It is almost impossible to overestimate the damage already done, much less to anticipate the further damage to come, which in all likelihood will increase geometrically in terms of both acceleration and impact.

The excellent BBC programme on chaos/complexity theory was shown again only last week. The Secret Life of Chaos is still available on iPlayer. Watch it if you want to understand the forces at work over which we have absolutely no control, but which we can survive if we respect them and prepare.

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Update: 3 PM GMT

The Wall Street Journal now reports 26 are dead in storm-related incidents.

CNN reports that the hurricane's damage extended far inland. Here is part of an account of the situation in Vermont, not a state usually associated with hurricanes:

Fueled by rain from Tropical Storm Irene, Vermont's normally tranquil streams turned into raging monsters Sunday night into early Monday, inundating towns, washing away four of the state's iconic covered bridges and killing at least one person.

The water was receding Monday morning, but not before inflicting some of the worst flooding the state has seen since 1927, according to state emergency officials.

Some towns were "entirely covered with water," said Mark Bosma, a spokesman for the state's emergency management division.
Virtually every waterway in the state flooded, and 260 roads were impacted in some way after as much as 6 inches of rain fell as Irene passed the state. ...

For instance, Otter Creek in Rutland, Vermont, went from a depth of less than 4 feet Sunday morning to more than 17 feet at 1:45 a.m. Monday -- nearly four feet higher than the record set in 1938, according to the National Weather Service. While it was falling Monday morning, it was still 8 feet above flood stage. ...

In Brattleboro, a city of 12,000 people on the New Hampshire border, Whetstone Brook flowed out of its banks and undermined a three-story building, threatening to bring it down.

"We've seen nothing like this," said Barbara Sondag, town manager for Brattleboro.

The rampaging waters also battered the state's iconic covered bridges.

Between four and six of the bridges were were lost, state emergency officials said.

Life-long resident Jesse Stone watched the White River rip away at the footings of the historic Quechee covered bridge as it washed through the heart of the town.

"It is just about impossible to imagine this bridge being taken out," Stone said in an iReport. "It's usually (way) above the water level."

In the ski resort town of Ludlow, near Okemo in south-central Vermont, town communications officer Dave Vanguilder said about three dozen roads in the area were closed. Three or four bridges were washed out.

For Chris Perkins of Washington, a weekend wedding turned into a longer commitment after rains cut off all routes out of Rochester.

"The bridges that connect the town to other areas have been washed out," according to iReporter Perkins. ...

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Update 8 PM GMT

A friend who lives in the Northeast has sent a damage report:

Lost three trees. Ripped out of ground, roots and all. No power or water. Town has 100 percent without power or water. Trees and power lines down everywhere. Nearest prediction of when electric lines will be picked off road, trees removed off road and power and water back up is 7-10 days. I live in a beautiful shoreline community with state parks and beaches. They are all ruined. All sand off the beaches. Docks destroyed. Roads washed away.

. . . We won't be normal for weeks. My kids were supposed to start school today. Canceled until next week. This smart phone can charge in the car and connects me to the Internet and to texting and phonecalls.

Exploring Silence VII

2011-08-23T07:46:00.000-07:00

Irenaeus (2nd c.) '. . .is the first writer to have a Christian bible before him. . . . [He] completed the first great synthesis of Christian thought . . . . what became the main elements of Christian doctrine'.[1] His worked is summed up in a famous aphorism, but it is telling that today only the first half of the phrase is usually cited. 'The glory of God is the human person fully alive; and the glory of the human person is the beholding of God.'[2] The two clauses are interdependent. According to Irenaeus, God and the pre-lapsarian Adam and Eve were in continual communion in silent beholding.[3] Adam and Eve are distracted from this beholding by the first conversation with the snake—speech is both cause and consequence of their distraction. This break was necessary, however, so that Adam and Eve could have their freedom and grow to maturity; they had to learn to choose to behold: otherwise they would only have been automatons. To choose to behold and to live from that beholding is the Christian task (Cloud, chs. 4, 6 Hodgson 14/21-22).

For Irenaeus, as for much of early Christian tradition, especially monastic tradition, obedience is synonymous to listening with the ear of the heart. The theme is taken up by the key New Testament text, Phil. 2: 5-11, which uses the Greek word υπηκοοσ, intense listening, for 'obedience'. Responding to its instruction, Egyptian and Syrian desert dwellers, like John the Solitary, made silence their lynchpin. As Ephrem (4th century) tells us, Mary conceived through her ear;[4] her beholding reverses the distraction to which Eve succumbed through hers. It is in this way that Mary be-holds, holds God who is beyond being in being and time by conceiving her son—the word ιδου appears three times in the annunciation in Luke 1: 26-38. The notion of the ear of the heart is found throughout the Hebrew scriptures.[5] In silence—of which the desert is symbolic—listening with the heart and beholding interpenetrate. By contrast, Athanasius' life of Anthony the Great says that noise is a sign of the demonic (cap. 9).

For Augustine (354-430), '. . .true rhetoric culminates in silence, in which the mind is in immediate contact with reality . . . . all dialectic, true rhetoric, and thought itself were but attempts to re-ascend to that silence from which the world fell into the perpetual clamor of life as fallen men know it.[6] His contemporary, Evagrius of Pontus (345-399), is another incisive observer of the psychological processes of the mind seeking silence and the attacks to which it is subject.

Syriac writers are particularly keen observers of the work of silence, of the need to redress the balance between self-consciousness and core silence, to restore the circulation of the self-conscious mind seeking silence and re-emerging from it trans-figured. Isaac's predecessor, Abraham of Nathpar writes: 'There is a silence of the tongue, there is a silence of the whole body, there is the silence of the soul, there is the silence of the mind, and there is the silence of the spirit . . . .The silence of the spirit is when the mind ceases even from stirrings caused by spiritual beings, and when all its movements are stirred solely by Being; in this state it is truly silent, aware that the silence which is upon it is itself silent'.[7] Although he writes in Greek, Pseudo-Denys is a Syriac monk familiar with the Syriac liturgical tradition.

Beyond those writers already mentioned, those in the medieval West who give accounts of this topic also include, to name only a few: Cassian, Guigo II, Bernard, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and Gerson. The last institutional advocate for the work of silence was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). Cusanus says that the image of God in the human person is found in the mind's ability to transcend itself.[8] He is doing metaphysics based on an observable phenomenon,[9] the suspension of self-consciousness, which is the primary meaning of excessus mentis in these writers, although it is not limited to that term. Richard of St Victor uses deficio, for example. But more on this in a moment.

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[1] Irenaeus of Lyons by Eric Osborn, CUP, 2001, pp. xi, xiv, 10.

[2] Privy Counselling, Hodgeson 83/33-35. Jesus can be thought of as the undistracted.

[3] Irenaeus Adversus Haereses 4:38. While Julian of Norwich almost certainly knew nothing of Irenaeus' work, her text could reasonably be seen as an extended gloss on this famous aphorism; she is the Apostle of Beholding.

[4] See Hymns on Virginity, 23:5. The Luminous Eye, by Sebastian Brock, Kalamazoo, Cistercian, 1992.

[5] E.g., Deut. 6:4; Ps. 45:10; Ps 46: 11; Ps. 62:1; Ps. 95:8, Is. 30: 15; Is. 50 4; Is. 55: 3. God, who is found in silence, has a name that cannot be pronounced. God's word is silent, but is spoken in the lives of those who have heard it in their hearts; 'it shall not return empty' (Is. 55: 10-11). I AM will be wherever this hearing happens.

[6] 'St Augustine's Rhetoric of Silence' by Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 23, No. 2, (Apr. - Jun., 1962), pp. 187 . . . 192.

[7] The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life, tr. Sebastian Brock, Kalamazoo, Cistercian, 1987.

[8] Pauline Moffitt Watts, Nicholas Cusanus: A Fifteenth-Century Vision of Man (Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1982), 139; Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicolas of Cusa by Nancy Hudson, Catholic University Press, 2007.

[9] 'The biological and metaphysical were understood as wholes within wholes, the one never precluding the other.' Gretel Ehrlich, In the Empire of Ice, Washington, D.C., National Geographic, 2010, p. 232.

Ecclesiastical History and Ecclesiology

2011-08-18T02:08:00.000-07:00

I went to an instructive open meeting of Ecclesiastical History Society at the cathedral yesterday afternoon—though not, perhaps, instructive in the way that was intended. It was the opening event of their conference, a round-table discussion by an Anglican bishop (a descendent of Dean Inge, John Inge, now Bishop of Worcester); the head of Churches Together in England, a URC minister named David Cormick; and the head of Blackfriars, Richard Finn, OP. The theme was 'What has Church History ever done for the Church?' What follows in no way does justice to what any of these participants said, but I am highlighting points for further discussion.

As one might imagine, the opening presentations were suitably anodyne, everyone bending over backwards to 'be ecumenical'. I sat there thinking how out of date it all was, how every important question was being begged. While the Anglican, sitting there in purple shirt and pectoral cross, dutifully mentioned the humbling aspects of church history, he clearly wasn't into making any adjustments in practical terms, or bringing up any embarrassing subjects (which is doubtless why he is a bishop).

The URC person spoke about church history having put an emphasis, especially since Vatican II, on churches' individual identities. I inwardly groaned. More on this in a moment. He took up the baton—the usual sort of ploy in these discussions where the most Protestant representative takes up the cause of the most RC—in defending Eamon Duffy and putting down Diarmaid McCulloch. Duffy is a good historian, but sometimes, in my view, there's just a bit too much of 'because it's Catholic it's better' (e.g., Catholic ice cream is better than other kinds of ice cream just because it's Catholic) about some of the things he says. This is an attitude that I have run into with Catholics everywhere, but is particularly pronounced in England where RCs still regard themselves (in a rather self-satisfied way) as the martyred minority. In fact, there are more practising RCs than Anglicans in this country. This speaker also deplored the side-lining of systematic theology, at which, again, I nearly groaned aloud. More on this in a moment.

Richard Finn, the Dominican, was actually the most impressive, laughing in rueful way that the Dominicans suffered fewer losses during the Reformation than anyone else.

Then the discussion was opened to the floor and after what appeared to be a planted question from a don from Cambridge, a woman stood up and asked the most wonderful awkward question. What is the relationship, she said, between ecclesiology and ecclesisastical history? Everyone gasped.

I nearly shouted for joy, because the elephant in this particular discussion was that every historian worth his or her salt knows that claims such as 'apostolic succession' as that is traditionally understood have absolutely no basis in history, nor is there any justification in the gospels for the sort of religious institutions we have today—and yet here were these professors, nodding and bobbing and weaving about each other as if it nothing were askew. This is the problem with ecumenism, and even more, trying to mix ecumenism with ecclesiastical history: for decades the discussions have been and are still being conducted on assumptions that absolutely no one who has even the slightest knowledge of church history any longer accepts. And as this knowledge is no longer confined to scholars and ecclesiastics, but is out there and available to the interested and discounted laity, the people conducting these discussions evidently have no idea how surreal their activities look to those not in the loop, or if they do, they think playing the game is more important. But the problem with this game is that they are playing with people's souls.

The impact of this awkward question created the most delicious moment. I really admired Richard Finn because he had the grace to blush; he turned beet red and was clearly embarrassed but in the best possible way; he knows the claims his magisterium makes have little factual basis or justification in light of the gospel. (I was talking to another RC scholar earlier this week who said teaching in the RC church is like living in Soviet Russia.)

Of course all the panelists talked around this awkward question; no one responded to it directly. I went over to the woman afterwards and thanked her; she and the people sitting nearby were talking about today's church as a construct of the context of the present, not really having anything to do with Christianity per se. This is one conference I would really like to sit in on but there's no possibility of that. What a great beginning—though probably not in the way the powers that be might have expected. I hoped beyond hope that they would see it as an opportunity to foreground what has been repeatedly shoved into the background.

This morning we had the proof of the would-be ecclesial pudding that refuses to acknowledge its ingredients and be mixed: after Matins the group bifurcated. On opposite sides of the cathedral, Anglican and RC Eucharists took place simultaneously, each making their own magic cookies. It was grace, surely, that dictated that the only moment the two liturgies were in sync was at the Our Father—in different translations, of course.

Lately I have been working on Pseudo-Denys (Paul Rorem, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols ... ), who says that our salvation is not in the elements but in the ever-deepening interpretation of symbols (a word that has far greater depth of meaning than the impoverished sense of today), and that the highest form of interpretation is without words. In light of this work, the events of yesterday afternoon and this morning were more than ironic, and very, very sad. I will be writing more on 'salvation through interpretation' in future posts.

A brief word about identity, systematic theology, and, by extension, methodology.

Identity: human beings are most themselves when they forget about themselves. We say to teenagers, 'Don't be so self-conscious: be yourself'. We are the last to know who we are; the self is not the construct we make in our self-consciousness; it is the truth that is continually unfolding in the directly inaccessible, far reaches of our minds/hearts, as I have been discussing in the current series of posts, and in my recent book Writing the Icon of the Heart. If churches really wanted to come together—and it's hard to believe that they do, for who is going to give up power, status, self-certifying authority and the self-perpetuating myths?—then they need to stop worrying about their identities. They need to start practicing the self-forgetfulness for the sake of the community that the Lord that they claim to follow teaches. This is a futile hope, as John 14 teaches (see the last paragraph of my most recent post): it is impossible for institutions or any system to behold—but the situation does not have to be as extreme a travesty as it has become. The problem is that those in power are so blind that they do not realize that they are skeletons at their own feast. If there is one truth I have learned in a lifetime's association with the Church and with Academia, it is that a single-hearted seeking of truth—and the acceptance of human finitude in the face of the elusive qualities of truth—is not high on the lists of priorities; and the humility required to undertake this task is almost unknown.

Systematic theology: Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest systematic theologian, was a contemplative. His systematic theology was an attempt to reconcile what contemplation taught and what the hierarchy wanted people to hear. It was, of course, an impossible task, as Aquinas himself recognised. More recent systematic theology has been done under the influence of positivism. Systematic theology is not only so last century, it is also completely antithetical to the content and methodology of the gospels. Systematic theology creates a hierarchy of linear thinking. It is two-dimensional. It fails to represent the religion based on beholding—in fact, it is entirely destructive to it. There has been uneasiness about systematic theology for years, but the problem is that the scholars and theologians, like hierarchs, cannot bear to give up total control. Controlling 'God' is so much exhilarating. Systematic theologians seem never to have heard of Gödel.

What Christianity needs is not more systematic theology but rather the development of a relational theology, a molecular theology, a theology that admits it can only gesture but that somehow is able to point to the global, inclusive and infinitely open character of Christianity. This would be an interdisciplinary theology that learns to be content with ambiguity and acknowledges the absurdity of ecclesial claims. To put this in McGilchrist's terms, all of the brain's tools for 'religious' processing are in the right hemisphere. By contrast, systematic theology precisely appeals to the simplistic, grandiose, repetitive and controlling views of the left hemisphere. In such a circumscribed, virtual theology there can be only absence. I have gone on about this at length in previous posts, so will not belabour the point here.

This brings me to methodology. To quote from the paper, 'Behold Not the Cloud of Experience', that will shortly appear in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England VIII (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2012): 'It is folly to examine texts that teach contemplation [and I am convinced that many sayings in the gospels are doing precisely this, and that patristic and medieval writers understood them so] using the very system of thought against which they are written. To use a methodology that demands closure on a text that is leading the reader into infinite openness not only destroys it, but also locks the reader into lesser beholdings. [Privy Counselling 92/45-93/5 in Hodgson's edition]. This is a recognized problem in philosophy, and if philosophy, then even more ipsa philosophia Christus (LeClercq, Love of Learning..., p. 100). As Karmen MacKendrick notes:

"We still must use words; we still must draw out the questions that lie within philosophy. It is only that we have learned that we must use philosophy against itself, wrap our words around spaces without words, and leave them wordless, as if they could thus be kept, though we know that we lose them together with ourselves. [Karmen MacKendrick, Immemorial Silence (New York, 2001), p. 5.]"'

Exploring Silence VI

2011-08-15T11:27:00.000-07:00

Because this positive sense of interior silence and beholding coinhere, we must for a moment anticipate. The English word behold accurately reflects the psychological and theological nuances of the Hebrew [e.g., hinnay, hinneh;] and Greek [e.g., ιδου, θεωρει, idou, theorei] words it translates, confirmed in part by Jesus' commentary on behold in Luke 17:21, which is echoed in Matthew 24:26 and Mark 13:21.[1]

Having lost the word behold, post-Enlightenment translators have often found this passage incomprehensible.[2] The point of the passage is that the word behold is not analytical; it does not refer to the external; it is not applicable to the linear and the material. It is a wrong use of the word behold to use it to say 'here it is, there it is'. The word behold is appropriate only to the kingdom of heaven within, and that kingdom is beholding. By extension, the kingdom of heaven cannot be manifest among you until it is manifest within you (the same Greek word entos (εντοs) is used for both within and among, but the word choice of which to use is clear from the context if one understands the significance of the word behold in the Hebrew scriptures.

Emphasis on the third idou is implicit. In the earlier version of his bible, [3] Wycliffe uses 'lo' twice followed by 'forsooth lo'. The Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible and KJV use the more idiomatic 'lo' in the first two instances and the more formal 'behold' in the third. The New King James omits the 'behold' but retains the emphasis 'see. . .see . . . indeed' even though the entire sense of the passage is lost. It is fundamental to Gregory of Nyssa's theology;[4] Luke 17:21 is in the background of the famous passage in Augustine's Confessions X.27.38. Cassian quotes it in Conference 13 immediately following his remark equating distraction with fornication.[5] And The Cloud of Unknowing could be seen as a gloss on this passage.

This passage is foregrounded in the contemplative tradition. Isaac of Nineveh (7th c.), drawing on much earlier writers, insists that the kingdom of heaven has always meant contemplation.[6] This sense also occurs in Richard of St Victor's The Mystical Ark III.5, 10; it is alluded to in Walter Hilton's Scale 2.33.

From this it is not difficult to see how misleading translations of the bible can lead to contemporary misinterpretations of medieval texts, if one is not using the medieval Vulgate. It is also not difficult to see from this understanding of behold why institutional Christianity is quite rightly afraid of contemplation, for in John 14, Jesus says to his disciples that while they can behold [θεωρειτε], the system [κοσμοσ] cannot behold [θεωρει], and because it cannot behold [θεωρει] it cannot receive the spirit of truth or know it. κοσμοσ is usually translated 'the world' but the Gospel of John is about Jesus as the new temple and by extension the human heart as the holy of holies. Here Jesus is alluding with particular irony to the temple system as he speaks of worldly systems in general, which are by definition confined to the linear and the hierarchical which are alien to beholding.[6]

It is not hard to see why the medieval church came to regard the bible as a very dangerous book indeed.

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[1] This important verse is so obscure that it often does not appear in scriptural indexes (e.g., Walsh on Cloud; Zinn and Chase on Richard of St. Victor).

[2] For example, the New Jerusalem translation uses the analytical word look for all three occurrences of idou (ιδου), missing entirely the internal clue as to whether entos (εντοs) should be translated within or among.

[3] The Earlier Version of the Wycliffite Bible, vo. 7 the Gospels edited from MS Christ Church 145, by Conrad Lindberg, Stockholm Almqvst & Wiksell, 1994, p. 150. He also uses behold and see but a spot check does not turn up any particular pattern in his choice of these four words, which further study might reveal.

[4] From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa, Jean Daniélou, London 1962, pp. 100-101; On the Beatitudes, sermon VI, P.G. XLIV 1269C-1272A, quoted in the Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology: An Approach to the Cloud of Unknowing, Vol. 1, Rosemary Ann Lees, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, A-5020 Salzburg, 1983, p. 16.

[5] 'Fornication' in the bible usually means worshipping false gods. 'But we ought to be aware on what we should have the purpose of our mind fixed, and to what goal we should ever recall the gaze of our soul: and when the mind can secure this it may rejoice; and grieve and sigh when it is withdrawn from this, and as often as it discovers itself to have fallen away from gazing on Him, it should admit that it has lapsed from the highest good, considering that even a momentary departure from gazing on Christ is fornication. And when our gaze has wandered ever so little from Him, let us turn the eyes of the soul back to Him, and recall our mental gaze as in a perfectly straight direction. For everything depends on the inward frame of mind, and when the devil has been expelled from this, and sins no longer reign in it, it follows that the kingdom of God is founded in us, as the Evangelist says "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, nor shall men say Lo [ecce] here, or lo [ecce] there: for verily [Amen] I say unto you that the kingdom of God is within you."' www.osb.org/lectio/cassian/conf/book1/conf1.html#1.13.

[6] Jesus seems to want to return to the pre-law Judaism of beholding; the law, after all, is a concession because the people refuse to behold.

UK Riots

2011-08-11T03:40:00.001-07:00

There are excellent commentaries at these links:

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/riots-reflect-society-run-greed-looting

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-society

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom/

Comments Worth Foregrounding from Exploring Silence IV

2011-08-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

Changeinthewind:

"..meditation is only a first and minor step in a process that shifts the centre of consciousness..." What follows? Thank you.

Maggie Ross:

Meditation can be abused as well as used. One can, for example, meditate in order to become a more efficient killer.

  Meditation has to have a context and be subject to intent. The modern distinction between religion and spirituality is very dangerous—not that believing the propositions of a particular sect is important, but it is vital to know what you believe, what your ethics are, and your purpose for meditating, that is, your intent.  

Meditation can introduce you to silence, but it will not root you in silence, or shift your centre to the deep mind. Meditation can introduce you to the possibilities that silence offers for trans-figuration, but these effects are only incidental.  

Most people go no farther than meditation because they are more interested in justifying who they think they are, rather than becoming who they really are. The reason for this is that they are unwilling to pay the price, unwilling to let go of their ideas of themselves, to begin with; unwilling to wait in the dark in complete openness; unwilling to turn away from noise and static in their minds whenever they notice it in order to to reach into the dark; unwilling to seek solitude and silence; unwilling to radically simplify their lives.   

These are not conditions of entry in to the silence; rather, the silence itself demands them. Realising that the silence is costly, and not willing to risk the effects what they do not know, most people sell their souls for a mess of pottage and miss their inheritance, which is the kingdom of heaven, i.e., a life animated by contemplation.

Changeinthewind replied:

Wow! A thoughtful and provocative response. Thank you.  

"These are not conditions of entry in to the silence; rather, the silence itself demands them.

"  I feel willing to do all of this.   What you say is necessary to a contemplative life I now do or try to do.  

There could be improvement but I live a deliberately simple life.   

"..unwilling to wait in the dark in complete openness.."  

Perhaps "just living" can be the dark I now feel? What once felt purposeful and beautiful is now a feeling of stuck ness in what seems to be just a meditation practice.  

Are you suggesting that the stuck ness reaction was/is an ego defense; a not yet willing at the core to pay the true cost?  

Or is it, this too shall pass.

Maggie Ross replied:

Perhaps the most important thing is not to worry what it "feels" like, nor to worry about the outcome, or the price, or anything else. Let go expectations. Let go ideas of what it 'should be like'. Let go evaluations. Just be.  

Equally important is that you turn to 'reach into the dark' (or listen every more deeply in the silence, or whatever metaphor works for you to get you beyond what often becomes a meditation-generated capsule) outside of meditation, in your ordinary life.   

When you catch yourself allowing the noise and static in your head to be your entertainment, deliberately turn away from it towards the silence and make some sort of interior metaphorical (entirely metaphorical) intention/gesture (again, whatever metaphor works) of opening to the silence, of 'choosing' the silence instead of the noise, of reaching into the dark in love.   

It's utterly simple; there is nothing to 'do' except choose to have this intention when you catch yourself in noise of some sort [it will also help you survive environmental noise you can't do anything about, and calm strong emotion]. You only need to do it once in a lingering, leisurely sort of way and then forget about it and go on with ordinary life in as much simple silence as possible—forgetting even this. (You will recognize the paradox of intention).  

Then the next time you catch yourself being entertained (or abused) by noise (internal especially, but also external) repeat the exercise. Gradually you are using your intention to influence your deep mind to change/shift your energy centre from self-consciousness to the deep mind. Eventually you will wake up one morning , or quietly realize over a cup of tea in the afternoon, that you no longer have to choose do this exercise, that the silence is now doing the animating.  

Don't make too much of this. it's simplicity itself. It's a bit like trying to look at the star cluster called the Pleiades: if you look at them directly they tend to fade; if you look at them out of the corner of your eye, obliquely, they shine clearly and brightly. Try to avoid looking at what's going on out of your sight (you can't see it anyway and it's none of your business!); just make the simple choice/intention or 'reaching' into the silence in faith—a faith that is deep enough to relax and forget you have done it.

When you find yourself in noise, choose silence; that's it. As the shift takes place, the degree of simplicity of your external living conditions will find its own level.  

No two people are alike in this, and simple pleasures are important—think 'Babette's Feast'—in the sense of, for example, delectable, very fresh, food now and again, food that is carefully, thoughtfully, beautifully prepared in love and eaten with great attention and love; or some other simple pleasure—are greatly to be desired. For Fr Zossima in the Brothers Karamatsov, it was jam in his tea. It can be something very simple: a flower, a starry night. These moments of deep gratitude, beholding, appreciation, etc. enhance the silence and help you deepen into it.   

It's important to continue your regular meditation until the day you realize that silence has taken over, and meditation actually seems like a form of noise, or withers. All the same, you will probably have to go back to it from time to time as a kind of refresher, because it's rare that the shift is permanently seated; we do slip. It's not a fault. It just happens; we're humans, not machines, and we live in particularly tumultuous and uncertain times. Paradoxically the silence makes one both more sensitive—acutely so—and simultaneously more unshakeable.  

It is also important always to read very good things, a little at a time (like eating the good food above—quality, not quantity); to keep your eyes from harmful images—you will become more impressionable to such things and purging bad images, if you let them in, is a chore; to keep your ears from harmful words as far as that is possible, or violence in any form, ditto. Again, these things will follow automatically as you choose/intend/reach into the silence. If bad things are said to you or happen to you allow the silence to absorb them and your feelings with them.  

Simple, simple. 'Unless you become as a little child. . ." This is what that passage means, in part. Bless you, and bless you for the courage to share these questions with others.  

PS I have used neutral language in describing this for the most part, because religious/theological language has been ruined. But you can make the translation, I'm sure.

Exploring Silence V

2011-08-06T11:55:00.000-07:00

How long shall I be in the world of the voice and not of the world of the word? For everything that is seen is voice and is spoken with the voice, but in the invisible world there is no voice, for not even voice can utter its mystery. How long shall I be voice and not silence, when shall I become word in an awareness of hidden things; when shall I be raised up to silence, to something which neither voice nor word can bring?—John the Solitary 5th c. [1]

In a single paragraph, John the Solitary (also known as John of Apamea, 5th c.) has created a map of the spiritual life: the longing; the mind's way into silence; the transfigured knowledge beyond knowing, tasted and yearned for, that is given there; the problematic relationship between silence and speech; and, by implication, the differential between global and linear, inclusive and discriminating, the knowledge of and through unknowing and the merely conceptual (Cloud ch. 68; 68/18-21). [2] Unknowing is not anti-intellectual but coronal knowing, relinquishing the merely logical to a multidimensional, relational epistemology.[3] Silence for John and for similar authors is not an escape from the world but a way of being in the world.

The word silence in this context is a liminal term that evades definition,[4] one of a small group of words that includes behold. They are performative in that they give the linear, self-conscious mind a taste of what they signify, a brief respite from its restless analytical processing (Cloud, ch. 7, H. 16/5). Thus to speak the word silence breaks the silence, but also bestows a momentary engagement with what it signifies.[5] These threshold words operate in such a way that normal grammatical rules are of questionable use. [6] Behold, for example, does not ordinarily take an object ('the rest of the sentence is for those who do not behold'),[7] although it does take personal pronomial suffixes for emphasis as in the biblical 'behold me', usually misleadingly translated as 'here I am.'[8] We might say that these words belong to a missing 'third voice', which English/American and other grammars lack: a voice that conflates active and passive, that indicates an alert receptivity and profound engagement.

Until the early modern period the word silence signified a life of interior space. For example, 'God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere' is a saying that can be traced back to Empedocles.[9] Isaiah 33:17 says, 'Your eyes will see [Heb. behold] the king in his beauty; they will behold a land that stretches far away.[10] Hebrew and Greek authors are careful to distinguish bodily seeing from beholding or inward vision.

[1] Sebastian Brock, 'John the Solitary, On Prayer', Journal of Theological Studies, New Series, 30 (1979), 84-101, p. 87.

[2] The pre-Socratics and the Platonic and neo-Platonic traditions have much to say about the work of silence, as do the Hebrew scriptures, e.g., "For God alone my soul in silence waits." Ps. 62. The beholding of God is inclusive, e.g., The Cloud-author says that in 'goostlynes alle is one'. (ch. 37) The chapter title of ch. 68 reads: ' þat noȝwhere bodili is eueriwhere goostly . . .', and riffs on it in the next one (ch. 69): How þat a mans affeccion is merueylously chaunged in goostly felyng of þis nought, when it is noȝwere wrouȝt.'

[3] Cloud, ch. 14 last para. Bonaventure's description in the Itinerarium, especially chapters 6 and 7, gives a good description.

[4] Modern notions of silence tend to relate to the material world and to have negative connotations of suppression and restraint, e.g., to make silent, complete absence of sound (Compact Oxford).

[5] Behold seems to indicate grasping, but it is by ungrasping that one beholds. The paradoxical nature of these two words indicates that they are doorways into liminality.

[6] Ursula le Guin put it well: 'Rules change in the reaches.' A Wizard of Earthsea, New York: Bantam Spectra, 2004, p. 172.

[7] 'Jesus in the Balance,' p. 155.

[8] The shift in sense is from 'renew our I-Thou covenant' to a nuance of alienation and autonomy.

[9] Louth, op. cit.

[10] The first Hebrew word translated in the passage has nuances of a seer; the second what the seer sees from his beholding. In the NRSV the translator has chosen the weaker of the words to translate as 'behold'.

Exploring Silence IV

2011-07-30T02:36:00.000-07:00

The mind's work with silence and its effects involves the entire person, including the body. It is a normal part of everyday functioning and is for the most part hidden. It is common to human beings and recognizable across cultures and religions. It is only when the process is observed and interpreted that it acquires philosophical, psychological and/or religious nuances. The model we are concerned with is available to anyone who cares to observe their own mind. It does not require an education. As Gerson remarks, 'Even women and the illiterate can reach the highest contemplation.'[1]

While self-knowledge in the ancient and medieval worlds includes a moral inventory, it is even more a matter of learning both how to understand the process and to receive the gifts of the mind working in silence. (Cloud, ch. 67; 66/31-34) It is only by accessing the silence and allowing it to do its work that human beings can come to the 'kynde knowyng' that Langland's Will so greatly desired, and which Holy Church so signally failed to teach him.[2] It is only by learning to drawing one's life from this kynde knowyng that the outward forms of living change, not the other way around (Cloud ch. 61; 63/11-13).[3] This process cannot be taught in the way that chemistry can be taught. The teacher of the work of silence can only point the way; each person has to experiment—or 'prove' it, as the Cloud-author would say, for him or her self.[4]

For this reason it is possible to say that each of the authors who writes about this dynamic could have done so without reference to any of the others (Cloud ch. 70; 70/9-15). In that case the texts would have been far different to what we know—but we need to be aware that there is not always a textual trail to be followed, nor is the knowledge contained in them necessarily inherited. But in fact these authors do not write in a vacuum, not only because they are educated people writing in a context of community and communion, but also because they are keen to cite any authority that will give their work credibility. To those unfamiliar with it, the work seems incredible; it is counter-intuitive, and it is threatening to certain kinds of institutional leadership (I Cor. 1:23). In addition, the nature of the work makes it very difficult to find language to express this dynamic. This poverty of language cuts several ways: it means that writers do borrow from one another, but it also means that similar phrases occur in authors who may have no connection at all. It also gives rise to extravagant allegory and metaphor.

For readers of these texts who are unaware of the work of silence, language that describes the details of the process may be misinterpreted as expressing philosophy or metaphysics. Conversely, a description of what a particular phase of the process feels like may be mistaken for a theological, doctrinal or spiritual declaration.

---------

[1] Georges Duby and Philippe Braunstein, 'The Emergence of the Individual' in A History of Private Life, vol. II, Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 1988), 624. [Given the medieval attitude towards women, it is tempting to translate ydiota as idiots; etiamsi sit muliercula vel ydiota seems deceptively and patronisingly translated by Duby and Braunstein as 'the humblest of believers, the simplest of spirits' ('. . . lorsqe le fidèle le plus humble, l'esprit le plus simple').] The entire sentence reads: Ex quo alteram concludimus differentiam quoniam theologia mystica licet sit suprema atque perfectissima notita, ipsa tamen potest hubri a quolibet fideli, etiam si sit muliercula vel idiota. De Mystica Theologia IV.30, Gerson, Oeuvres complètes, Introduction, texte et notes par Mgr [Palémon] Glorieux (Paris, 1960), vol. 3, p. 276.

[2] 'Langland's "Kynde Knowyng" and the Quest for Christ' by Britton J. Harwood, Modern Philology, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Feb. 1983), pp. 242-255. As Julian says in chapter 69, 'And the beholding of this while we arn here, it is full plesant to God and full gret spede to us. And the soule that thus beholdyth it makith it like to him that is beholdyn, and onyth it in reset and peas be his grace'. By the time of Piers Plowman, the institution had nearly lost the ability to teach 'kynde knowing', if indeed it remembered what it was.

[3] In his little-known treatise for nuns, De perfectione vitae ad sorores Bonaventure he says, if you do not understand your worth as one who shares God's divinity, then your relationships with yourself and the world around you will be troubled. He states the difference between the positive effects of the self-respect gained through contemplation and the destructive ones of narcissistic self-esteem, although of course this is not the language that he uses. In this treatise for women his idea of capax dei, or capacity for God, is not that we are mere passive receptacles, but includes an active dynamic of—paradoxically—our being drawn by God's outpouring.

[4] Buddhist meditation is taught this way to this day. So are modern 'secular' versions as this one from The Guardian: www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2011/jan/22/how-to-meditate-ten-steps-headspace. However, for the Cloud-author and similar writers, meditation is only a first and minor step in a process that shifts the centre of consciousness from the conceptual mind to the wellspring of silence.

Now Available

2011-07-27T01:29:00.001-07:00

Exploring Silence III

2011-07-22T00:51:00.000-07:00

What he beheld as present he will have to comprehend as an object, . . . only as an It can it be absorbed into the store of knowledge. But in the act of beholding it was no thing among things, no event among events; it was present exclusively. . . . . And now it is locked into the It-form of conceptual knowledge. Whoever unlocks it and beholds it again as present, fulfills the meaning .[1]

Seeking into the beholding is the work of life -- the ‘travel’ [travail] of spiritual childbirth.[2]

That the British and the Americans are divided by a common language is a very old joke, but many tragic arguments have arisen over the simple but fundamental misunderstanding that in British English everything is assumed until it is mentioned, and in American nothing is. No matter how long an American lives in the UK, it is still possible to be tripped up by absent cultural assumptions, a kind of persistent aporia in one's consciousness. It is only minor comfort to observe that among themselves the British seem to play a national game of trying to guess what the other person really meant by his or her remark.

However, the joke becomes very unfunny when scholars of any nationality deliberately refuse to address their own epistemological aporia. Many ancient and medieval texts are riffs on the structures and processes revealed by the mind's work in and with silence. They mark the unmeasurable paths by which it becomes quiet and self-forgetful, relinquishing its contents into the core silence of the person, where a transfiguration of perception takes place that effects profound changes in speech and behaviour (Cloud ch. 59; 61/37-62/1)—what I have called the work of silence. Yet much of today's scholarship that focuses on these texts is structured by and confined to dialectic. [3]

Too often scholars bow to the pressures of prevailing academic fashion, ignoring or rejecting outright the very notion of the work of silence on the grounds that it is 'religious'. This is a misperception: the workings of interior silence are entirely neutral and become religious only through interpretation. As the philosopher Karmen MacKendrick has noted:

Perhaps mysticism seems so odd or archaic to us because it has no place in a fully confessional [4] culture. Many of us scoff at the ineffable, at the very possibility of ineffability, and assume that whereof one cannot speak, one is simply inadequately educated and articulate—or lying. [5]

A chosen and deliberate blindness and deafness to the dynamic of silence and the ineffable that is a key to understanding many ancient and medieval texts [6]—and art—distorts scholarship for future generations. And, as we shall see, ineffability plays an essential role in the way the everyday human mind works in fact.

Let us first look briefly at the model of the mind and then list the tell-tale signs by which this model becomes apparent in texts. I will be using the phrase the work of silence not only because I want to emphasize the neutrality of the process, but also because I want to include in it not only what the Cloud-author means by the werk, and what Julian of Norwich means by seeking to the beholding, but also convergences with observations that have become apparent in neuro-biology.[7]

-----------------

[1] Martin Buber, I and Thou, tr. Walter Kaufmann T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1970, p. 91. I came across Buber's stunning exposition of behold vs experience only in the winter of 2009-2010, thanks to a passing reference in Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God, OUP 2007, pp. 167ff. I must have read I and Thou fifty years ago at Stanford, but it had completely gone out of my mind, if at that immature age I understood it at all.

[2] 'The Apophatic Image: The Poetics of Effacement in Julia of Norwich' by Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England V (Cambridge: 1992), p. 71.

[3] These texts are often dismissed in the name of scientism. In the 1950s, clinical psychologist Ira Progoff translated The Cloud of Unknowing because he felt it would be useful in his work. (The Cloud of Unknowing Introductory Commentary and translation by Ira Progoff, Rider & Co., London 1957). In his introduction Progoff wrote: 'Those who seek to find the objective "mechanisms" of the psyche and who follow, consciously or not, a personal ideology of materialism in one variation or another, feel something alien in such procedures [the development of the faculties of the inner life]. They react against them emotionally, castigate them as "spiritual" and dismiss them as non-scientific. The profound psychological significance of the many and varied disciplines of personality development is thus altogether dismissed. The evidence is dismissed peremptorily, simply by disdaining to discuss the subject. Thus in the name of science, a most unscientific act is committed; and the science of psychology is deprived of a source of information and insight that can contribute greatly to the task of understanding the dynamic processes at work in the inner life of man. . .' (pp. 15-16) He is referring to the work of silence. 'Nonetheless,' he continues, '. . .experimental work has been going on for many, many centuries in the understanding and channeling of the dynamic processes of man's inner life. These. . .have not been "controlled" in the modern sense; nor have they provided quantitative data. But, by a persistent, cumulative gathering and testing of personal experience [the medieval sense of the word], through individual trial and error over the eyars, by reflecting, reconsidering and reattempting the work, a process of experimentation in the disciplined development of the personality has been carried on and a body of knowledge has been accumulated.' (p. 17).

[4] One might add: consumerist.

[5] Immemorial Silence by Karmen MacKendrick, New York, SUNY, 2001, p. 4.

[6] And for certain early modern and modern authors such as Simone Weil and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

[7] There are innumerable articles and books that render current findings accessible to non-scientists, for example, in newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, and The New Yorker, as well as in books such as The Master and the Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Ian MacGilchrist, Yale, 2010; The Psychology of Religious Knowing by F Watts and M Williams, CUP, 1988; Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuro-Science of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom by Rich Hanson and Richard Mendius, New Harbinger 2009; or The Neuro-Biology of Religious Experience by Patrick MacNamara, Greenwood, 2006 (with the caveat that this book has a very crude account of 'religious experience').

Problematic Words in Medieval Scholarship II

2011-07-15T03:30:00.000-07:00

mystical/mystic are words that have become useless and misleading, associated with exoticism, a quest for self-autheticating experiences, occult practices, or, according to William Harmless, 'a catch-all for religious weirdness' (Mystics, p. 3). Gerson defined it well, but his definition is misunderstood and mistranslated. What has been translated as 'experiential' should in fact be translated as 'experimental'. 'Mystical theology is an [experiential] experimental knowledge of God that comes through the embrace of unitive love' (theolgia mystica est cognitio experimentalis habita de deo per amoris unitivi complexum). The misunderstanding of Gerson's famous definition is a prime example of how medieval texts are adversely affected when knowledge of the work of silence—theoretical or otherwise—is lacking. There is a tendency to seize on the first half of Gerson's remark—which is in fact the second and consequent phase of the dynamic he is describing. Gerson's definition has two parts. First there is the engagement with divine love, which is apophatic; then there is experiential knowledge, which is interpretation in retrospect of the traces which the engagement leaves. And finally, entailed in Gerson's remark, as the Cloud-author and others note, is the understanding that the contemplative is engaged in the process of relinquishing all claims to experience. The Cloud-author does not like the word. See Rosemary Lees, The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology: An Approach to 'The Cloud of Unknowing', Vol. 1 1983 (Salzburg, 1983), pp. 251-53. Lees' work is frustrating because her instincts are good but her insights are short-circuited by academic convention, a methodology that demands closure; and the failure to realise that both Denys and the Cloud-author are writing about an empirical actuality, not merely about theories or linguistic transmission.

object is misleading when used in regard to God, or a dynamic continuum such as beholding. 'God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere' is an aphorism that can be traced to Empedocles and describes an interior image that is familiar to many practitioners of the work of silence. There is no 'object' in beholding yet the engagement of beholding is far more objective than subjective experience. See Martin Buber, I and Thou, tr. Walter Kaufmann T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1970.

rational when linear is meant. Ancient and medieval people did not think that the part of the mind that is not directly accessible was 'irrational' (e.g., Dawkins). They correctly understood, along with today's neuro-psychologists (see Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, 2009) that it has its own, far more advanced epistemology than the limited, linear, two-dimensional epistemology of self-consciousness, which was one reason they were so eager to find a way into the deep mind. Interpreters such as A.C. Spearing, a self-declared Cartesian ('Margurerite Porete: Courtliness and Transcendence in The Mirror of Simple Souls' in Carolyn Muessig, Ad Putter, eds., Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages (London, 2007) pp. 120-36), who will not accept any self but what he imagines, wreak havoc on texts such as the Cloud. The 'order without order' (ordo sine ordine) of Bernard and Richard St Victor refers to the relocated centre of the person in the deep mind.

self needs to be located when it is used. Does this word mean the imaginary construct or is it the unfolding and ongoing transfiguration that is happening out of sight, or something else? There is a very great difference between the notion of a shared nature with God of the patristic era and the Middle Ages, and the soul as 'a cavity of total depravity' of the Reformation.

spiritual direction is an invention of the Counter-Reformation, a practice that did not exist in the 14th century. The term is often retrojected onto 14th and 15th century texts by modern commentators (e.g., James Walsh, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing (Mahwah, 1998)). Medieval monastic spirituality was above all based on the Vitae Patrum, Cassian, and associated texts. The Carthusians in particular understood the desert wisdom, from which they took inspiration at their foundation and which they enshrined in their statutes, that the same person would not always have the Word that was sought, and that spiritual maturity was acquired by exposure to many elders, not just one; that dependence and self-preoccupation were ever-present temptations. It is significant that the Cloud-author uses 'counsel and conscience' to indicate taking advice from the elders, making it clear that the ultimate discernment was up to the individual.

state (and similar words) implies linear, hierarchical, static, photographic, and is inaccurate when applied to mental processes, which are holistic. It implies a mechanistic model and instantiation. Optimally the global deep mind informs the linear self-conscious mind and vice versa. state gives the sense of a static hierarchy when the work of silence is a global process.

supernatural in the present age has connotations of magic and the occult, implies dualism, and evokes a world view that is no longer understandable to today's readers. The word has lost its earlier sense of grace building on nature.

transcend/transform are words that are misused and misleading when describing the processes of the work of silence, and related theology. Both words are dis-incarnating. The interior life leaves nothing behind (transcend) nor is one thing changed into another (transform). There is no magic involved; frogs do not change into princes and princesses. Neither word is appropriate to describing spiritual maturity. Instead, through beholding the disciple is transfigured in every sense: perspective—the way one 'figures things out'—is changed. Nothing is wasted, nothing is left behind; through wounds comes healing. In the resurrection, the wounds of Christ do not disappear; they are glorified. Only the devil appearing as Christ has no wounds, being too vain to bear them.

union has dualist connotations, the coming together of two entirely separate entities. Onying carries more of the sense of shared nature with God.

visionary needs to be located as the word has taken on nuances of exoticism. Are the images described associated with lectio divina? Are they made public in didactic form, e.g., what might have been a chapter talk? Are they story-telling? Do they show signs of being eidetic images (such as children have; as Blake had and taught his wife to have)? Are they political? Do they accord power to the visionary? If so, do they follow the First Commandment as formulated by Anthony (e.g., Bridget of Sweden's do not): 'Your life and your death is with your neighbour'?

Event Horizon and Deep Mind/Theology

2011-07-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

This post is a response to some questions from someone who wishes not to have their comment published but was asking what I meant by the 'event horizon' and 'engagement with the deep mind. Also if I have a sense that at some point Christianity turned away from Christ and if I seek that breaking point in my scholarship (yes, that's one of the minor goals). What is the relationship between the deep mind and Christ, and what does this have to do with going to church on Sunday morning. Quite a menu, but thank you for asking! I'd much rather respond to people's questions than write into a vacuum.

[But please, when you don't want your comment published, PUT THE REQUEST DO NOT PUBLISH IN BIG LETTERS!!! Otherwise I might inadvertently overlook it.]

As a friend of mine recently said, it's amazing it takes so many words to explain something that is to utterly simple! So, apologies for the length of what follows. It will be expanded in subsequent posts.

It's a bit frustrating because there is a diagram I have created that for copyright reasons I can't (yet) post on the blog.

Imagine a flask laid on its side with the opening pointing to the right. Imagine that it has a connecting space, a wide tube, if you like; then imagine on the right side of the diagram an infinitely open, multi-dimensional space. Imagine that the energy centre is on the R. and that there is free flow between the two sides. This is the ideal; most of us are stuck on the L. and that's where the culture wants us, because if we're stuck on the L., it can exploit us.

This diagram represents a very simple version of how ancient and medieval writers understood the mind to work, much of which finds consonance with modern neuro-psychology. Writers such as Evagrius, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Denys, Richard of St Victor and the Cloud-author understood that theology develops in part from how the mind works.

The left-hand side, the flask-shape, is the self-conscious mind. The connecting tube is liminality, and the right-hand side is the deep mind, which we can't access directly, but which we can influence by intention, paradox and resonance. The 'event-horizon' is at the point where liminality elides into the deep mind; beyond this point the self-conscious mind cannot go. Writers exploit this faculty all the time. I will think: 'next week I will write about pumpkins in my garden' and then forget about it. When next week comes around the essay is already done. All I have to do is sit down and let it flow through my fingers. Or think about another example: the word on the tip of the tongue, which you have to forget (and forget you are trying to remember) in order to create a mental 'space' into which the word can be given back to you (it is gratuitous) from the deep mind. The deep mind is also activated by word-knots, that is, a word that carries many meanings, puns, allusive language, apophatic images, rituals, etc.. Self-consciousness, by contrast, likes banality and repetition.

L. side (self-consciousness) has virtual perception; R side has direct perception. L side of brain can hold 40 items in play at any moment; R side, 11 million. L side tends to circularity and has one form of attention (which in meditation it uses to subvert itself). R side perceives directly. It is multi-dimensional and has at least six kinds of attention; it is where the connections are made, where metaphor and wordplay are processed (See Iain McGilchrist, The Master and the Emissary: The Divided Brain and the History of the World (New Haven, 2009). The R side, then, is anything but irrational, but scholars often call cognition that is non-linear 'irrational', and use the word 'rational' when 'linear' is meant; the R. side is not irrational, it is rational in a far more sophisticated global and multidimensional way.

Liminality is as far as self-consciousness can go. Here are the threshold and effects of unseen communication with, and input from, the R. side, but liminality is not the R side. Liminality is where the effects of the work of R side first appear. The person must wait in liminality in attentive receptivity for gratuity, for what irrupts from the R side. This is contemplation properly speaking. There is an analogy with what physicists call an event-horizon. In this case the horizon is caused by the impossibility of direct access to the deep mind but, paradoxically, waiting in the event-horizon provides the necessary conditions for indirect access to and irruption from the deep mind (the deep mind can be influenced by intention, as every writer knows). See Rothschild Canticles f 104r at www.flickr.com/photos/beinecke_library/. Contemplation is not to be confused with abstraction, which is a function of the self-conscious mind (à Kempis), nor with trance (Rolle). In auto-hypnosis, self-consciousness is still in control (see the works of Milton Erickson on medical hypnosis). Experience goes no further than liminality because experience is always interpretation—it is a function of the virtual mind. It is nonsense to speak of an experience of excessus mentis. If there is excessus, there is no mentis.

— Excessus mentis, the suspension of self-consciousness, ordinarily happens many times every day. It is essential to the learning process. That it has occurred can be discerned only very rarely by its effects. The suspension of self-consciousness is entirely gratuitous; there is no way to force it. Excessus mentis is not the goal, however, and one-pointed meditation is only a first and minor step in a larger programme. The goal is to move one's centre from self-consciousness (L.) to the deep mind (R.) so that the latter can inform all of life through exchange with self-consciousness. As this process matures, excessus mentis fades in terms both of incidence and significance. It becomes the hidden source on which the self-conscious mind continually draws.

To translate this into Christian terminology: the L. side is our fallen mind; it was distracted from its continual beholding with God in the garden of Eden by the first conversation with the wise snake. If Adam and Eve hadn't been distracted they would have been automatons, and God wants his people to be free. He wants them to choose to behold. (This account is in Irenaeus, 2nd century). That is all God has ever asked of people. God is in the seat of the soul on the R. side of the diagram. It is here the Spirit is at work. So to receive what God has to give, we have to let go the chatter and ideas (even of God) in our self-consciousness (which is only a virtual picture of reality anyway) in order to re-connect with the R. side, where there is direct perception, continual beholding, and the Spirit gives new life. Once the mind is re-connected with itself and the continuum restored, the Spirit can increasingly inform all of our self-conscious life. It's never a question of either/or but rather putting self-consciousness at the service of the deep mind instead of the other way around.

This is what Phil. 2:5-11 is referring to: we need our self-consciousness, but it has a tendency to think it is God. All of its ideas, particularly the construct of 'self' has to be repeatedly relinquished into the silence to be trans-figured. Literally. It is the way we 'figure things out' or our perspective that is changed. It is incarnation, transfiguration and resurrection rolled into one. This movement to subject the self-conscious mind to the workings of the spirit in the deep mind is the en-Christing process—Jesus was a person; Christ is a process. We might think of Jesus as the un-distracted who taught us this en-Christing process, which is re-connecting with God's life in us and ours in him through beholding; continually choosing to turn away from the noise with which we distract ourselves to—metaphorically speaking—reach into the 'dazzling darkness', to wait on what it has to give. Gradually this process takes over so that we are no longer the initiators of the movement, but are animated by the Spirit.

* * * * *

So to answer your other two questions, yes, the church did turn away from this knowledge; in fact, it actively suppressed it until, by the time of Luther, within the institution, it was lost. Obviously there were people who kept it alive: women who had clandestine translations of Marguerete Porete made; Quakers, poets, hymn-writers, Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil—anyone, in fact, who had the patience to sit and watch their own mind.

And lastly, what does it have to do with going to church on Sunday morning? Alas, not much because without this knowledge those who create the liturgy and language no longer know how to help us be 'onyd'. The disappearance of the word 'behold' from modern translations of the bible is just one egregious example. Anyway, to help people be onyd with God is no longer their agenda, sadly; self-perpetuation is. And they certainly don't want us to be spiritually mature because we might wake up and find out the emperor has no clothes on.

And if the question arises but what about one's neighbour? What about charity? Good works? The answer is that a community is only as healthy as the solitudes that make it up, and any charity that does not arise from the overflow of love that comes from contemplation tends to be patronising and exploitive. 'Your life and your death is with your neighbour,' said Anthony of the desert. But we must learn the gracious spaciousness of God's love within ourselves first so that we can then welcome our neighbour into that gracious spaciousness.

Definition of 'Pathos of Shakenness'

2011-07-11T02:46:00.000-07:00

Changeinthewind asked for a definition of 'shakenness'.

Andrew Shanks, What is Truth? Towards a Theological Poetics, Routledge, 2001, p. 15:

'And here, then, is what I mean by 'the pathos of shakenness'. Such pathos is that paradigmatic quality of the gospel story which John reflectively expresses, above all, where he writes of darkness and light; and which recurs wherever, through art or ritual, the Holy Spirit is at work carrying forward gospel truth in new expressive ways.

'As pathos of shakenness it is a registering of the sheer intensity of moral chiaroscuro belonging to any really decisive moment of truth. As pathos of shakenness it is a registering of the intensely urgent need of thought deriving from such moments, consequent upon the weakening and collapse of all the old fixed reference points of establishment-mindedness.'

Problematic Words in Medieval Scholarship

2011-07-08T14:43:00.001-07:00

For the paper I'm giving next weekend, which will be published in the next volume of the Medieval Mystical Tradition in England series [Exeter Symposium], I've compiled a list of problematic words. In recent years, people seem to have become extremely sloppy about the words they use when writing about medieval religious texts—or any religious texts. Here's the first half of the list. I'll get back to the paper on silence in the next-but-one post.

achieve is not proper to contemplation or the higher reaches of the spiritual life, which are gratuitous (paradox of intention)

affective refers to the notion of the primacy of the heart (intention) over the linear intellect in matters of contemplation. It does not mean devotional kitsch. The extravagant expressions of love in Bernard, for example, are paradoxical because they are trying to communicate a love so deep as to be detached from its own desire.

contemplation/contemplative refers to a specific practice of contemplation,—attentive receptivity—which excludes interpretation. The term 'contemplative text' is nonsensical. Visionary texts do not describe contemplation unless, like Julian's text, they move the reader from image to contemplative event-horizon and engagement with the deep mind. Didactic texts do not teach contemplation unless, like the Cloud of Unknowing, they intend to lead the reader to the contemplative event-horizon and engagement with the deep mind. Devotional texts are not directly conducive to contemplation; nor are trance-inducing texts (Rolle; trance is liminal but self-consciousness is in control. See the works of Milton Erickson on auto-hypnosis). Abstraction (à Kempis) is not contemplation; it belongs to the realm of self-consciousness, not deep mind. This model suggests that Julian's Long Text and the Cloud are the only two texts that are properly associated with contemplation among the English texts with which they are usually grouped. To these might be added one contemplative interlocutor: Will, of Piers Plowman. See also habitual and mystical below.

experience in the medieval sense means an experimental, provisional interpretation that is to be tested against scripture and tradition. This is opposite to the modern sense, which is related to self-authentication. The modern sense is incipient in the later Middle Ages (e.g., Gerson, Epistle 26, April-June, 1408). While it is appropriate to say religious experience it is nonsensical to say contemplative experience and absurd to say experience of excessus mentis. If there is excessus there is no mentis. Experience may be associated with fele in texts that describe exercises designed to stimulate artificial emotions, self-dramatization and performance, but not with fele as it is used in The Cloud of Unknowing, where it gestures towards touching the unfathomable and dazzling dark.

false self/true self (the former needing to be destroyed or suppressed) is a modern notion, a dualism that has also insinuated itself anachronistically into academic study of medieval texts. It is a self-judgement that takes place entirely in the self-conscioius/conceptual mind, not the deep mind. It is not only not a medieval notion, it is not even a Christian notion (Matt. 7:1), as everything created is good, and 'synne is behovabil' (Julian LT, ch. 27).

grasp is not appropriately used in terms of faith or contemplation, e.g., 'those who have difficulty grasping faith', as both are about un-grasping. Most of the pistis verbs in the Gospel of John, for example, are intransitive. The opposite of faith is certainty. Faith has been confused modern times with propositional belief because it has been used as a term for a body of doctrine, e.g., the Faith.

habitual is a word associated with self-consciousness (habitual sinner—to sin requires self-consciousness) and is not appropriately used when speaking of contemplation, because a contemplative has given over initiative to the Spirit who animates.

lifestyle refers to fashionable outward forms of living; it is inappropriate when applied to the medieval monastic world of the Cloud, which is a way of living that arises from within. There were, of course, monasteries such as Cluny that were far more about style than about the monastic life. It is important to make the distinction for the modern reader.

Andrew Shanks

2011-07-05T08:19:00.000-07:00

A Friend writes:

As I have been sorting through things, I found an old email note (from 2002) where I was lamenting all the ways and places I have hoped that the Church might be the Church--and each time "I was wrong". Part of that was reference to a Yorkshire priest, Andrew Shanks, in an essay in CrossCurrents. http://www.crosscurrents.org/shanks.htm He works in Hegel, Kant and the poets Holderlin, Blake, and Nelly Sachs.

I realized that I also have a book by him, and found it: What is Truth: Towards a Theological Poetics. I discovered that I had never finished the book, and so turned to the end to read his conclusions.

'It not only has theoretical implications, for the reading of shaken poetry. I think it also has quite practical implications, for the reconstruction of the church's liturgy. For what has been the basic rationale traditionally at work in shaping our liturgical calendar?

'Judging from the results: for the most part, an absolutely primary importance has been accorded to the church's supposed role as the carrier-community for correct metaphysical doctrine. In view of which, the first priority for the designers of the church's liturgy has been the growth and prosperity of their community, by whatever means considered most effective for that purpose, virtually regardless of any other consideration.

'In so far as the carrier-community for metaphysical correctness is most likely to grow and prosper with the aid of a liturgy saturated with self-serving pathos of glory, well then, according to this logic, so be it. With the result that a liturgical year has developed which is, one might almost say, one long parade of all the reasons which the institutional church thinks it has to boast about itself. Much of our liturgy has, in effect, become a sort of salesman's pitch for the this-worldly church-institution, sublated into prayer. The sins we confess tend only to be those we commit as individuals; not those of the church as a corporate entity. But redemption is, all too often, more or less identified in practice with uncritically loyal church-membership.'

Exploring Silence II

2011-07-03T00:26:00.000-07:00

Much of the work on ancient and medieval texts has been done quite consciously and deliberately through the ideological filters of scholasticism, Calvinism, neo-scholasticism, Freudianism, positivism and empiricism; there has not been much opportunity for them to reveal what in fact they have to say on their own terms. We need to reconsider the methodology we use to examine them, and to be extremely careful in the choice of words we use to talk about them. Words can either help or hinder us in communicating a message that is difficult enough for any human being to take on board—difficult because it is simple, not because it is complex—much less twenty-first century people. Otherwise we are in grave danger of losing the ability to interpret these texts at all; and indeed, given contemporary cultural pressures, it may already be too late.

Most modern interpreters—there are a few exceptions—do not appear to understand the model of the mind or the dynamic that underlies ancient and medieval texts, nor do they recognize the significance of some biblical texts or the sense of the words within them, even though these texts may be quoted in the work in question. Interpreters often treat as philosophical abstraction or linguistic transmission what is actual—the way the mind works, or the way it 'feels', that is, its effects on the body—which anyone, literate or not, can work out if they take the time to observe their own mind. In addition, any use of the word mind seems to provoke a knee-jerk reaction that often wrongly labels the work (or the interpreter) Platonist. Just because someone is talking about the mind does not mean s/he is a Platonist. This label is particularly misapplied to biblical interpreters if they use the word mind, in spite of the fact that one of Christianity's core texts (Phil. 2:5-11) includes this word. The passage, among other things, is describing a psychological truth: that outward behaviour is changed only after and in consequence of a profound interior shift. Will, in Piers Plowman, persists with the question that underlies this passage: how can I come to 'kynde knowing'? But Holy Church and her companion Job's comforters not only will not but no longer can tell him, for the institution has lost its empirical base; instead, they subvert, invert, and ignore his question.[1]

Pseudo-Denys is another example. I have come to think of this much-discussed writer as John the Solitary (John of Apamea) in fancy dress, the costume being the language of neo-Platonism clothing a dynamic that cuts across religions and cultures. Pseudo-Denys is a hot topic, widely contested, but the confusion is all the greater because few of the scholars working on him understand this foundational dynamic/model. Since, as Iain McGilchrist [2] reminds us, form follows function, it is not surprising that there is a good deal of correlation between the insights of the ancient and medieval world about the the mind's work in and with silence, and contemporary neuro-psychology; whereas the assumptions of many modern interpreters of ancient and medieval texts are sadly wide of the mark—if, indeed, there is any coherence to their theories or their language. These misunderstandings distort scholarship in many disciplines: classics, patristics, medieval studies, history, theology, philosphy, to name but a few.

[1] 'Langland's "Kynde Knowyng" and the Quest for Christ' by Britton J. Harwood, Modern Philology, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Feb. 1983), pp. 242-255.

[2]Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale, 2009).

Exploring Silence: Practice and History

2011-06-28T01:35:00.000-07:00

Today begins a series of posts that are taken from the first part of a very long paper I have had to cut in half. The content, updated, will be appearing in my next book, Silence: A User's Guide. Because the passages are taken out of context the flow of the text will of necessity be somewhat fragmented, but perhaps the content will be useful.

This paper makes an historical case for the work of silence and its decline, and lays out a somewhat brutal account in secular terms of what the spiritual life is and how it works. Plaited into the contemporary language are strands from ancient and medieval authors who observed their own minds and wrote about what they found. Their findings form a consistent account of the work of silence through the ages. [1] A common model appears to underlay them, which is paralleled by recent insights from neuro-biology. Together they highlight characteristics in texts that signal when this model might be usefully applied for interpretative purposes.

There was a fundamental shift in psychology in the life of institutional Christianity in the West, that took place from the tenth century onwards, from putting on the mind of Christ, that is, self-emptying and self-forgetfulness; to imitation, which is inescapably reflexive. This shift is provoked in part by an increasing formalism, which becomes consolidated by the middle of the fifteenth century. It is accompanied by changes in emphasis from faith to belief/magic; from interior practice to external observance; from apophatic opening to controlled imagery and emotions; from a spirituality that is interiorly motivated to one that is externally driven, from using the entire mind, most of which is directly inaccessible, to confining spiritual activity to the conceptual mind and its construct of identity.

It entails a gradual move from one epistemology to another through the exchange of content for method. In the process, a foundational empirical dynamic and understanding [2] is eliminated from the institutional repertoire in both theology and praxis, that is to say, the understanding of the work of silence that had previously led monastic life and theology to be called 'philosophy' until it was eclipsed by the spreading influence of Aristotle in the second half of the twelfth century. [3] Failure by interpreters to acknowledge this shift has led, among other problems, to indiscriminate and inappropriate use of the word 'experience', which has altered meanings—in some cases, rendered opposite meanings—when these texts are translated.

This shift in emphasis progressively reduces institutional life, whether Catholic or, eventually, Protestant, to a subjectivity controlled by officially sanctioned images, formulas and stereotypes. It is in part as protest against these trends, and the need for a corrective, that writers whose subject is contemplation take the risk of setting down their varied accounts of the work of silence. As it becomes increasingly apparent that they are fighting a losing battle, some of their metaphors become correspondingly extreme—the use of annihilation language, for example, or the Cloud-author's 'destroy' (e.g., ch. 8).

[1] ' . . . the monastic Middle Ages received form the patristic era a terminology and themes and a whole vocabulary whose meaning cannot be grasped if their [patristic] source is not recognized.' The Love of Learning and the Desire for God by Jean LeClercq, Fordham Univeristy Press, 1982, p. 99. LeClercq is discussing problems parallel to those discussed in this paper, but with different emphases.

[2] 'This formative period for mystical theology was, of course, the formative period for dogmatic theology, and that the same period was determinative for both mystical and dogmatic theology is no accident since these two aspects of theology are fundamentally bound up with one another. Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, OUP, 2007, p. x.

[3] LeClercq, p. 101.

Price difference!

2011-06-27T21:49:00.003-07:00

A friend in the USA has done some research on the price of Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding:

From ABE (Book Depository--Guernsey) USD 11.85

From Amazon UK: USD 21.15

Amazon is not always the best price!

Now Available

2011-06-25T02:37:00.000-07:00

Yet More Word Matters

2011-06-24T02:12:00.000-07:00

'The night is passed, the day lies open before us' is hardly an improvement on 'the night is far spent, the day is at hand.' Why does it have to be so banal?

Equally the doxology ' . . . who is alive and reigns . . .' sounds like a desperate need for reassurance by means of a magic formula. This is what happens when 'remember' is substituted for the 'behold' in the original language. In the event, Jesus is not alive, he is glorified, which is utterly different.

And then there is the hamfisted translation of Isaiah 40:1-11, used at this morning's Eucharist, in the Anglicized NRSV, which is unspeakable:

40
Comfort, O comfort my people,  says your God.  

2 Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,  and cry to her  that she has served her term,  that her penalty is paid,  that she has received from the Lord’s hand  double for all her sins.

3 A voice cries out:  ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,  make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

 4 Every valley shall be lifted up,  and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level,  and the rough places a plain.

 5 Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,  and all people shall see it together,  for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’

 6 A voice says, ‘Cry out!’  And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’  All people are grass,  their constancy is like the flower of the field.

 7 The grass withers, the flower fades,  when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;  surely the people are grass.

8 The grass withers, the flower fades;  but the word of our God will stand for ever.

 9 Get you up to a high mountain,  O Zion, herald of good tidings;  lift up your voice with strength,  O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,  lift it up, do not fear;  say to the cities of Judah,  ‘Here is your God!’  

10 See, the Lord God comes with might,  and his arm rules for him;  his reward is with him,  and his recompense before him.

 11 He will feed his flock like a shepherd;  he will gather the lambs in his arms,  and carry them in his bosom,  and gently lead the mother sheep.

Comment and Contact

2011-06-22T00:42:00.000-07:00

Gentle Readers, it is apparent that some of you are unsure about the comment and contact process, so here's how it works.

When you make a comment on a post it does not immediately appear on the blog because I moderate the comments. Blogger sends me an email containing the comment with the option to publish or not (or mark as spam). This email from Blogger is a 'no reply' email. It does not have your email address on it.

So if you want to contact me directly, ad feminam, you need to include your email address in the body of the text and to put 'Do Not Publish' at the top of the comment. I will not post your comment, and will reply privately.

Thank you again for all your thoughtful responses.

Common Worship Crazies

2011-06-21T01:54:00.000-07:00

Common Worship can be crazy-making in its obtuseness, and the ignorance with which it has altered texts.

The suffrages for Evening Prayer in the BCP 1979 includes the following: 'That this evening may be holy, good and peaceful.'

This has been transferred in Common Worship to Morning Prayer, but it has been changed to read 'That this day may be holy, good and joyful.'

To be horrified by this change may, at first glance, seem like nit-picking, but between the two versions there is a great gulf fixed.

Jesus said, 'Peace I leave with you.' He didn't say, 'Joy I leave with you.' The word peace is carefully chosen.

'Seek peace and pursue it' is possible. We can make peace. We can bring ourselves to interior peace, which gives us external peace, which has a ripple effect on the world around us.

But joy is a gift. It is a by-product of peace and of self-forgetfulness. Like happiness, if you pursue it, you will never find it, because you are looking for a result for yourself. Happiness and joy come unawares to those who live in beholding. And when they come they are unrecognisable because the question 'do I have happiness, do I have joy joy' is no longer possible. That is to say, the person no longer has the self-preoccupation to care either way.

In this ham-handed change to the suffrage, do I detect the dead hand of the evo-factory? It has more than a whiff of clenched smiles, vacant eyes and closed minds.

Assisted Dying

2011-06-14T01:54:00.000-07:00

Last night, along with millions of other people in Britain, I watched Terry Pratchett's film on assisted dying, and the Newsnight debate afterwards. When this programme comes to your TV screen, don't miss it. It's kind, honest, compassionate, and addresses—and raises—the issues without flinching, and in the best possible way.

There was much that was unsaid, however, as there had to be in a film of only one hour's duration. Some of these issues were addressed in the somewhat shambolic discussion afterwards, chaired by Jeremy Paxman. It was clear that the opponents to assisted dying had blinkered agendas and weren't listening to anyone else's concerns or the larger issues. Of course there have to be safeguards, but no-one has any quarrel with that.

The disabled woman was understandably worried, almost paranoid, about disabled people being gotten rid of, to the point that she couldn't begin to conceive that there might be other questions, situations, contexts or points of view. She revealed at the end that she was far more interested in getting respect for disabled people than listening to others and responding to the issue at hand.

The appalling Bishop of Exeter—he has already caused some people I know to leave the C of E—prated on about the sanctity of life in the abstract, having told the world that he had just sold his mildly retarded daughter's flat out from under her and rather proudly intimated that she has no rights except what he deems appropriate. He said the choice of life or death was not a 'right' whereas the Pratchett film had been very careful to point out that it is indeed a right under the European declaration.

Let's look at the sanctity of life. You can't mouth platitudes about the sanctity of life when there are not enough hospices, when pain control is not guaranteed, when there is abuse in care homes, and when the elderly are ignored or treated with disdain as intractable and distasteful problems, instead of as human beings; and, further, when the elderly and disabled are bearing the brunt of the financial catastrophe caused by greedy and irresponsible bankers, who, even as the poor get poorer, are making record profits.

A recent BBC film exposed the abuse, even torture of people in care homes. I'm not saying this sort of treatment is universal, but the level of care in most of these institutions is less than basic, to say the least. It is common knowledge that many care homes drug their inmates (there is no other word for it) to make them less trouble, that there is so little stimulation, such poor staff training and monitoring that these inhuman conditions in themselves constitute abuse, passive rather than active. Diana Athill, who has written about her evidently idyllic care home (run by a charity) is a lucky woman, and the care home where she lives an obvious model, but it is the exception, not the rule.

Talking about the sanctity of life under the conditions many elderly people face is a sick joke. The whole idea of 'the market', of making a profit off the elderly—much less younger people who are sick and suffering—is obscene. In the United States people are routinely over-treated—even if they have signed living wills—just so greedy hospitals and doctors can make more money. My father was subjected to unnecessary surgery at the end of his life when there was absolutely no hope of his surviving it, and it would accomplish nothing. He had terminal lymphoma; the intestinal blockage was simply the last event. The hospital and the doctors made tens of thousands of dollars out of this unnecessary suffering inflicted on him.

As for me, I already wear a 'do not resuscitate' bracelet. I am even thinking of having 'DNR' tattooed on my chest. I have signed a living will. I have absolutely no intention of ending my life in a care home. That moment will never come, no matter what I have to do. If by the time I can no longer manage alone there is no legislation and protocol in place that guarantees a safe and comfortable process to help me out of life, then I will have to do the best I can. I will go to Switzerland if I cannot die in the UK, or if that is not possible, I will do what I have to do. I have far too much respect for the sanctity of life to subject mine to the systematic dehumanisation to which far too many elderly and dying people are subjected.

Anniversary

2011-06-11T04:34:00.001-07:00

Gentle Readers,

Tomorrow, June 12, is the thirty-first anniversary of my solemn vows.

Please pray for me!

And thank you for your interest in this blog.

Hay Festival

2011-06-07T06:14:00.000-07:00

Just back from the quite wonderful Hay festival. Although I was out of Oxford only 36 hours, I was completely disoriented when I woke up yesterday morning, not quite sure where I was or in what world. Being at the festival was so utterly different from my usual routine that my system must have had quite a shock, which my dreams—none of which I remember—tried to sort out. For the first few waking hours of the day, particularly at Matins at the cathedral, I could hardly tell which images were 'real'—that is, had actually occurred in time and space—and which were not. The ultimate sign of a good time, I suppose! But I sat myself sternly down to work on my paper for the July conference (EETS) and by afternoon, thankfully, it was steady as she goes.

It seemed to take forever to get to Hay on Saturday. The railway tracks are all torn up between Oxford and Moreton-on-Marsh so buses were put on, foolishly at the same time as the trains—and of course the running time over the roads is not the same as over the rails, and an 8 minute connexion was just too nerve-wracking to contemplate. When I bought my ticket I was told that if I came early there would be another bus—but of course there wasn't one planned, and it was only because a train was canceled and enough irate passengers insisted that they put the extra one on. I ended up having a complete tour of the Cotswolds, even passing through Honeybourne, which seemed like the end of the earth. I'd like to go back there, though, because it is home to the Domestic Fowl Trust.

We finally arrived at Worcester and in the end the wait for the train was only 20 minutes. We arrived without incident at Hereford, where Rachael Kerr, who had arranged all things Hay, kindly met me and another friend, and took us to the festival.

And what a festival it was! The atmosphere was welcoming, embracing all the paradoxical characteristics of creative thinking: intense yet low-key, laid-back yet intellectually exciting. There were thousands of people there, including a large contingent of children—who had their own festival events—but it was so well organised and designed that you never had a sense of being crowded. People sat in cafés, on the ground (in the fine weather), on the edges of the boardwalks, while others walked rapidly from event to event. There is now a 'fringe' festival in the town at the Globe, mostly philosophers, but some presenters did both festivals. There was a shuttle to and from the town.

This gemütlich atmosphere was even more in evidence in the artists area (the Green Room), where the speakers hung out. Coffee and wine always available, meal and snack vouchers, complimentary tickets to other speakers' events; minders if you wanted them—whatever made you feel at home. It was the sort of atmosphere that put even the largest ego on its best behaviour, and there was plenty of potential for big egos. Some of the people I glimpsed—or more often were pointed out to me!—were: Melvyn Bragg, Bob Geldorf, Julian Assange, Jon Snow (who in the most natural manner was fetching coffee and drinks for his assembled party). I connected with old friends and met some new ones.

At my first session on Sunday morning at 9 AM, there were, unbelievably (because it was the last day and there had been a lot of parties going on the night before), more than 100 people in attendance. Rachael interviewed most competently. I was very humbled and impressed by the quality of the questions from the floor, both at this session and at the panel at 11:30 with Howard Jacobson, Sir Roy Strong, and Peter Guttridge. At that one we talked about Genesis, the Psalms and Revelation. After the earlier session, my books sold out at the signing in the bookstore following the talk.

There were about 600 people at the second session—again, everything smoothly and competently handled. There were people to get you where you were going; then there were people to explain the geography of the venue, and format of the event, and then people to take you, when it was all over, gently by the hand (if you needed it) quietly gibbering back to the Green Room. Except that everything was so calmly and kindly done that the morning was a state of 'flow' with no jitters and no post-event paranoia. It takes great care and an immense amount of planning to create such an atmosphere, and hats off to all who played a role in that.

The only sad note was that I had no time to see the village or explore the bookstalls—or the pubs that were doing a huge trade in the most civilized way (in other words, no town square drunks). I went early to bed on Saturday night at the charming B & B, which had a wonderful, attentive hostess, and took everything with me when I returned to the festival as I had a ride home.

If you have a chance to go to the Hay festival in a future year, drop everything and go for it! It is not to be missed!

Absence

2011-06-03T01:02:00.001-07:00

Steve Hartwell's death has renewed for me the mystery of absence. He was diagnosed after I left for the UK, and so our goodbye at the airport was my last glimpse of him—typically hospitable, loving, and engaged in an act of kindness.

Now he is gone, and it's impossible to go to his funeral.

I had a similar-but-different experience some years ago when Abbott Conway, the much-beloved scholar and vicar of Great Tew, died. Unlike Steve's death, it was sudden and unexpected: Abbott died in his sleep. Two days before it happened I had an email saying he wasn't feeling well. This was followed, the next day, by another, a perfectly normal one, recommending a book—and then, twelve hours later, suddenly he wasn't there any longer. Again, I couldn't go to the funeral: Abbott died here in the UK and I was in Alaska.

I don't know whether 'closure' is a good thing or not. In the uncertainty, their presence and absence flicker together in my consciousness, along with the intangible gifts that are their legacy, and gratitude.

At one level I still can't believe they are no longer 'there'. At another, I feel absence to the depth of my being, not just their absence, but my own absence, as I will one day not-be.

More Language Matters

2011-05-29T12:16:00.000-07:00

Lest, Gentle Readers, you think the previous post was merely an aesthetic rant:

The way we use language affects the way we think, the way we pay attention, and ultimately, perhaps, the structures of our brains.

'The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world'. [The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, Yale, 2009, p. 5. This book is a far cry from the clichés of the 1970s about left brain/right brain, much of which has proved wrong; the situation is far more complex and subtle.] 'The right hemisphere underwrites breadth and flexibility of attention, where the left hemisphere brings to bear focused attention. This has the related consequence that the right hemisphere sees things whole, and in their context, where the left hemisphere sees things abstracted from context, and broken into parts, from which it then reconstructs a 'whole': something very different'. (pp. 27-28) In other words, the left hemisphere works with a representation of the reality the right hemisphere sees whole and direct.

'And it also turns out that the capacities that help us, as humans, form bonds with others—empathy, emotional understanding, and so on—which involve a quite different kind of attention paid to the world, are largely right-hemisphere functions'. (p. 28)

If we choose language that opens the mind of the receiver, such as the American version of the prayer in the previous post (without the repeated word 'ones'), or the proclamation 'Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us' (without the British interpolation of 'lamb'), the multi-layered meanings contained in them force the listener to suspend the everyday schematizing mind to be receptive to what I have called the 'deep mind', the part of the mind which is out of our sight. (see 'Jesus in the Balance' in this blog, 8 March, 2010 and the discussion in October 2010 about 'experience').

'The right hemisphere takes whatever is said within its entire context. It is specialised in pragmatics, the art of contextual understanding of meaning, and in using metaphor. It is the right hemisphere which processes the non-literal aspects of language . . .This is why the left hemisphere is not good at understanding the higher level meaning of utterances'. (p. 49)

The spiritual task could be stated in non-religious terms as the need to relocate the energy centre from which we live from the self-conscious mind (which can hold perhaps 40 items at any one moment) to the deep mind (which can hold perhaps 11 million, according to one account). While we must not make the mistake of thinking simplistically that there is a direct correspondence between mind and brain, in the sense that the self-conscious mind and the left hemisphere are really the same, or the deep mind and the right hemisphere, yet the brain is, as McGilChrist puts it, 'the place where mind meets matter'; what we do with our minds affects that matter.

The way we use language, especially in a liturgical setting, can facilitate the task of what I have called 'the work of silence' by helping the mind into the self-forgetful receptivity of the hidden, deep mind; or it can make the task more difficult by throwing the listener back into the self-conscious mind, reinforcing the concerns of the left hemisphere, which is what happens when the interpolations are made in the prayer and the proclamation mentioned in the previous post ('heal the joyous' vs 'heal the joyous ones'; 'Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us' vs 'Christ our Passover lamb is sacrificed for us').

The same can be said of music. There is nothing subtle about rock and hiphop: they are self-conscious music forms, and make the listeners self-conscious. While most rhythm is handled by the right hemisphere, the repetitive thumping — 'basic metrical rhythms' (p. 74) — of pop music are handled by the left hemisphere. These are but two of the reasons that pop music is inappropriate for liturgy, which, if it is doing its job, is opening us to the liminality ('betweenness' p. 72) of the apophatic and opening the apophatic to us.

But there is more: the way we think has an impact on the formation of our brains. For example, 'brain areas in individuals may actually grow in response to use. . .the right posterior hypocampus, the area of the brain which stores complex three-dimensional maps in space, is larger in London cabbies, taxi drivers with extensive navigational experience.' (p. 24) There are also well-known studies on changes in brain structures and functions of people who have meditated or prayed all their lives.

There are implications in these studies for everything we do in Western Christianity: the language of liturgy, the language of translation, the kind of music we use, the amount of silence within the liturgy, the gestalt—for the right hemisphere misses nothing. We speak of religion as communicating with reality, but if it is making us more self-conscious, focusing us on superficial details and virtual representations, shattering us with noise, then it is less than useless; it is destructive.

McGilchrist's book is fascinating, if somewhat hard to get into at first. It is essential reading for anyone who has a serious interest the relationship between mind and brain; how these affect the way we see the world and the way we create it for ourselves. And particularly for those with a serious interest in pulling Western Christianity back towards its empirical base, lest it die of triviality, banality, and an excess of words piled on words that have no longer have any referent.

Likewise, I'm Sure

2011-05-27T02:07:00.000-07:00

Gentle Readers, please bear with me for one more rant about the language of liturgy.

It just gets worse and worse.

The follow prayer appears in the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer (I have seen it attributed to St Augustine but do not know if this is correct):

'Keep watch dear Lord with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake'.

It's a beautiful prayer, and was warmly welcomed; it has been adopted by many other denominations.

But in its trans-Atlantic migration to the C of E's Common Worship (and in my view this service book is common in the worst sense), whoever is writing liturgy for the poor Anglicans has violated every principle of the translators of the KJV, which I have sketched out in recent posts. This timeless and inclusive prayer now sounds like someone throwing bricks. It reads:

'Tend the sick ones, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary ones, bless the dying ones, sooth the suffering ones, pity the afflicted ones, shield the joyous ones'. I duck every time I hear it.

Even worse, "Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us" (American BCP 1979), said at the Fraction, a phrase which transcends time and is refulgent with meaning—for example, that Christ is the way our passover is accomplished through his passover—has, in the dreadful Common Worship, become 'Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed for us'. Oh puh-lease. The addition of the animal means that Christ is history, a sanitized OT/Apocalypse reference, a cutsey fluffy lambkin in a stained glass window; the addition makes material what is meant as spiritual. So much for the climatic moment of the Eucharist in which the two halves of the bread are held apart: the addition of the word 'lamb' reverses the apophatic moment: we are dragged back into and bound in time, dropped with a thud into linearity and the hamster wheel of our self-consciousness. It is a cringe-making change, and sometimes celebrants choke over having to use it, as well they should.

I have heard that the new translation of the RC liturgy is even worse than the last one, if that is possible, with the possible exception that 'and with your spirit' has been restored. This surely is a step in the right direction. I remember talking to Madeleine L'Engle about the phrase 'and also with you' when it was first inflicted on us. She insisted that it would automatically provoke the response 'likewise, I'm sure'.

Sunday Evening at St Mark's Cathedral, Seattle

2011-05-23T00:25:00.000-07:00

Sunday night Compline in St Mark's cathedral in Seattle: it is the same this Sunday evening as it has been every Sunday evening for more than fifty years. Just before 9 PM, dozens of twenty-somethings gather outside the great west doors. Among them are university students, street people, young professionals. There is a sprinkling of older people, but the vast majority of the crowd is under thirty-five years of age.

As soon as the doors open, they file quietly into the semi-darkness to find places in the pews, sitting on the floor along the walls, sprawling in the sanctuary. The crowd continues to pour through the west doors in a seemingly endless stream until the great space is nearly full. As the people gather, the silence seems to grow, not diminish. There are a few whispers, but most people are content to let the silence seep into their bones. Cell phones are off; iPods unplugged. There are no signs asking for silence, no officious ushers, no clergy smiling tightly through their teeth.

At 9:30 a door opens to the right of the altar and a robed choir files in, pacing the length of the cathedral to stand at one side under the organ loft where they cannot be seen. Their leader sounds a note, and a clear unaccompanied tenor voice spins the opening line of the ancient service of Compline into the reverberating darkness. Another voice answers, complementing the silence. The choir picks up the ancient Gregorian rhythm of the psalms. The group sing a motet; a solo voice chants final prayers. The choir files out the way it came in.

When the choir has disappeared, the huge congregation sits motionless in the stillness, reluctant to move. The moment passes; people begin to get up and leave, their movements languid and gentle, as if waking from sleep. Some stretch and yawn. Many hold hands. At the west door two greeters stand with collection bowls, but their focus is welcome, not money. Scraps of conversation float by, "Mystical.... healing.... peaceful.... mysterious....." The half hour long service has been broadcast on the radio, silence and all, to a listening audience of more than 100,000 people, supplemented by unknown numbers tuned in on the internet.

It would not do to analyse this weekly phenomenon too closely but it is perhaps significant that the person who began it was a musician, a cathedral organist imbued with the play of sound and silence, and the resonance of stillness. It was a stroke of luck that the cathedral clergy refused to participate (perhaps they thought a lay-founded service was beneath them); it would now be inappropriate for them to do so. Whatever the motives, those who have continued the tradition have created an environment that has enormous respect for the innate ritual sense of the ordinary person.

It was this respect that was lacking two Sundays ago at the event that was so upsetting to the congregation, young and old alike. Beyond that particular event, however, Sundays in general are tough for a lot of people; Sunday afternoon is the haunt of "the noon-day devil". There is no reason that the fine speakers whom I have not gone to hear because of the raucous context could not make their presentations in the context of Compline in the St Mark's Cathedral fashion. Their remarks could be spoken in the semi-dark—forget the dais and the show-biz razzle dazzle.

As St Mark's has demonstrated, there is a real need for something like this on Sunday evenings. One would be forgiven for wondering why other churches have not taken a page from St Mark's book—but in these deaf and competitive days, that is probably too much to hope for.

This blog post is dedicated to the memory of Steve Hartwell, who for a time was Brother Isaac, SSF. Steve died last Saturday morning, the 21st of May, 2011. Along with his partner Ray, who survives him, he was one of the greeters mentioned in the above description, a pillar of St Mark's. He was multi-talented: vestment-maker, master of ceremonies, above all a kind and generous friend to anyone who came to the cathedral, and, in his private life, hospitable and generous almost to a fault. He would not have seen himself in this way, but his entire life was self-gift. He wanted to make people comfortable with God, helping to ensure that the worship had dignity, and flow, and beauty without being oppressive or pompous or kitsch. He was no stranger to suffering, and provided comfort to people without number. He will be sorely missed.

Language and Meaning

2011-05-19T06:50:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the Bath marathon reading of the Authorized Version of the bible (KJV) and in preparation for the discussion at Hay, I've been reading Adam Nicholson's wonderful book, When God Spoke English. His prose is worthy of the book he is writing about, and he has a way of voicing the unease that many people feel about contemporary religion and especially contemporary bible translations.

On p. 152-154 he discusses the evolution of Luke 1:57 from the Bishop's Bible to KJV to the New English translation. Translation by committee, however, has its drawbacks. One of the translators suggested the phrase 'was fulfilled', which was rejected. "The phrase . . . was a brave attempt at just the kind of lexical enrichment the Jacobeans enjoyed, and on which the King James Bible, almost subliminally, often relies. it carries a double hidden pun: not only had the time come for Elizabeth's son to be born, but she was both filled full with the child in her womb and fulfilled in her role and duty as the mother of the Baptist."

This layering of meaning is, incidentally, a very medieval way of writing. Middle English is full of such tropes.

Nicholson continues: 'The idea is marvellous, but the word is not quite right, a little dense, even a little technical.' It is replaced with 'full time came', which Nicholson says '. . .is irreproachably English, simple, accessible, conceptually rich, full of potent and resonant meanings as Elizabeth was with child. In Jacobean English full can mean plump, perfect and overbrimming, and all of these meanings are here. It is difficult to imagine anything being better done, but it wasn't thought good enough for the twentieth-century translators of the New English Bible. They settled on: "Now the time came for Elizabeth's child to be born, and she gave birth to a son."

'That is a descent to dreariness, to a level of banality . . .The modern world had lost the thing which informs every act and gesture . . of the King James Bible . . . and of that incomparable age: a sense of encompassing richness which stretches unbroken from the divine to the sculptural, from theology to cushions, from a sense of the beauty of the created world to the extraordinary capabilities of language to embody it.'

In other words, the intent behind KJV is thoroughly incarnational and, as Nicholson points out, embraces what seem to be all the wild incongruities of the age, the full range of what it means to be human.

Nicholson continues: 'This is about more than mere sonority or the beeswaxed heritage-appeal of antique vocabulary and grammer. The flattening of language is a flattening of meaning. [italics mine] Language . . which is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern consciousness, language, in other words, which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the bible requires. It has, in short, lost all authority. . . .It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died.'

Publication and Hay Festival

2011-05-16T03:20:00.000-07:00

Microcosm

2011-05-13T12:00:00.001-07:00

Why has the event described in the last post hit me so hard? I am still struggling with outrage. On reflection, what happened seems to have been a microcosm of what is going on in institutional religion in general, but in the C of E and Anglican Communion in particular.

Here was a rare opportunity to listen to the sort of person who comes along only about once in a century. Did the context in which he was to speak encourage reflective listening? It did not. Rather, it made one wish one were deaf; it was a physical relief when the atrocious, aggressive, self-centred and ego-generated 'music' finally shut up. Even then, the shattered atmosphere made it hard for people to settle.

If that weren't enough there were further distractions before we got to the main event and even then, the creative possibilities were choked off by the canned questions. Why didn't they have the sense to just let him talk? Give three short addresses on this darkest and deepest of psalms, interspersed with silence? Set them in the context of a reflective Compline? Ego again, and the need to control, control, control—and show off.

In short, the evening wasn't about gaining new and deeper insights from Rowan or an exposition of Psalm 88; it wasn't about exposure to humility and peace. Rowan's presence was an excuse for the perpetrators to parade what they stand for, which, sadly, is exactly opposite to everything Rowan stands for.

It has frequently been said that Rowan's gifts are wasted on the C of E and the Anglican Communion. I haven't wanted finally to believe this—I still had a modicum of hope—but after what I saw on Sunday evening, I have to agree. There was plenty of sycophancy, but there was little respect. Rowan was treated as a cipher, not a human being, much less the extraordinary teacher and person he is. The event only confirmed my sense that the Anglican situation has gone far beyond the point of no return.

It is not difficult to imagine an 'at large' role for Rowan, such as Tutu and the Dalai Lama used to have before they retired. In the event, the people who most want to hear what Rowan has to say, and are in sympathy with what he stands for, have, for the most part, already departed the institution.

Maybe he should stop wasting his time.

Inappropriate

2011-05-09T01:19:00.000-07:00

'My friend and my neighbor you have put away from me; and darkness is my only companion.' (Psalm 88:19)

So reads the end of one of the bleakest psalms in the book, the one on which Rowan Williams was speaking last night. He was in the middle an official visit to the Oxford diocese on a schedule that would have killed a lesser man. By 8 PM last evening he was clearly under considerable strain. His evident exhaustion was not helped by what he was about to endure.

I'd only been to this series once before—last Sunday. Once was enough: I wouldn't have come again except for Rowan. The current focus (the series is held only during Term) is on the psalms on which I'm speaking at the Hay Festival; and while I know what I am going to say, I was interested in other approaches. That I was underwhelmed last week doesn't even begin to express my response, not because of the speaker, who was adequate, but because of what surrounded the speaker. The event was sparsely attended, about fifteen people (as opposed to last evening when hundreds came to hear Rowan—and I doubt that any of them will return).

Eight PM on a Sunday evening in a quiet cathedral is neither the time nor the place for the sort of deafening, banal, puerile guitar-and-vocals blatting or piano elevator music that one associates with the worst evo-factories [to misquote Annie Dillard: 'Who gave the poor Anglicans guitars?']. But last Sunday that was what we got. The event attempted to be a combination of so-called evening worship entwined with three sets of canned questions and answers. From a liturgical point of view it was incoherent; it was impossible to figure out who the intended audience (I use the word advisedly: we certainly weren't a congregation) might have been or what the point of it was.

Last night was infinitely worse: there was the added torture of a rapper. The volume was ratcheted up to physically painful levels. The caterwauling was an assault: physical, psychological and liturgical torture. This isn't just me being an old fogey: even the twenty-somethings sitting behind me were appalled, remarking how inappropriate such yammering was to a cathedral, much less disrespectful to Rowan, much less contemptuous of the audience, much less unacceptable in the context of the sombre material of Psalm 88, much less to the hour of the evening when one is trying to wind down in preparation for sleep. Poor Rowan: I can't even begin to imagine what he must have been feeling under his always-gracious exterior.

There are several future speakers in this series I'd like to hear, but after what happened last night, never again. Frankly, I was quietly rude. (I wish I'd had the courage to be disruptively rude). While the perpetrators of this noise pollution were playing, in their full view, I held my ears. After Rowan had finished speaking, under cover of the audience standing to sing the Lord's Prayer (to a nauseating contemporary tune), I walked out.

There was a report last week that attendance at cathedrals on weekdays is increasing. Weekday liturgies in cathedrals tend to be low-key, full of silence, and accompanied by music of great beauty, carefully performed—in other words, entirely opposite to the nightmare that was wished on us last night. The organizers of this Sunday series should take note.

Also Relevant . . .

2011-05-06T00:59:00.001-07:00

www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-real-meaning-of-bin-ladens-death-2279630.html

Death of a Terrorist and Unanswered Questions

2011-05-04T17:44:00.000-07:00

Letters

The Guardian, Thursday 5 May 2011

Your correspondents have rightly been critical of the questionable legality of American action against Bin Laden and Nato attempts to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi (Osama bin Laden and wild-west justice, 3 May). Some 65 years ago US prosecutors and politicians led the way in rejecting the idea of simply identifying and then executing Nazi leaders when they fell into allied hands. Justice Robert Jackson insisted that if the western allies wanted to hold the moral high ground they had to be seen to behave differently from the defeated axis states. The Nuremberg trials gave an opportunity through due legal process for the victor states to demonstrate that the rule of law had to be applied even to the most lawless acts.

How the wheel of history has turned? Instead we have extra-legal murder squads, concentration camps, torture of suspects, wilful disregard for legal sovereignty. No one will shed tears for Bin Laden or for Gaddafi, but if the rule of law was good enough for the Nazi leadership, responsible for the greatest mass murders in history, it must be good enough for our current conflicts. It is time to put an end to the idea that lynch law is a legitimate form of international justice and to try to base Obama's limp claim that "justice" has been done on a restoration of international behaviour that respects those rules and sets aside the unconvincing assertion that the western killing is the archway to democracy. Robert Jackson would be turning in his grave.

Professor Richard Overy

London

• Although the killing of Mr Bin Laden appears to have been received positively in the west (Cheers, tears and beers..., 3 May), I for one struggle to understand on what basis the US can attack and kill a person in another sovereign state.

Bin Laden has not been convicted in any court, other than the court of public opinion. The US is not at war with Pakistan. As far as I am aware a state cannot declare war on an individual. What possible legal basis, other than "might is right", does the US have to kill this man, without even the cover of acquiescence by that state in such a killing? Can we expect Black Hawks to descend on the home counties in search of Julian Assange, I wonder? The US needs to provide a legal basis for this action or be held to account.

David Enright

Solicitor, St Albans, Hertfordshire

• Two things about the connection between waterboarding and the killing of Osama bin Laden (Report, 3 May). First, it is not essential to the case against torture that torture is ineffective; the case against torture is that it is prohibited legally and morally as an abomination, whether it yields useful information or not. Second, even if former vice-president Dick Cheney and Professor John Yoo are right about the effectiveness of waterboarding in this instance, their claim should be understood for what it is: that the unlawful use of torture helped facilitate the unlawful use of death squads. It is no justification for the commission of one crime (torture) that it helps facilitate the commission of another crime (assassination), even when those crimes are committed against people who are themselves dangerous criminals.

Jeremy Waldron

Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, Oxford

• So after 10 years US special forces finally killed Osama bin Laden. The evil genius is dead! He was a genius for taking questions to the empire's military, political and economic heart, but an evil one for the murderous methods he asked them. But as you cheer, please tell us one thing. We are malnourished Indian children, Palestinians corralled in Gaza, Bangladeshis sandwiched between Himalayan floods and inexorably rising sea, HIV-positive Kenyans with no access to retrovirals … we are all those clinging to the underbelly of this wickedly wonderful world system. How do we get answers to the questions of economic, social and environmental justice that Bin Laden so inappropriately asked?

Dr Jeph Mathias

Landour community hospital, India

• Now retribution has been exacted and the US has taken its "pound of flesh", it is time to sit down and talk (Brain food, 3 May). Even the British managed it with the IRA. And if the world has learned one thing over the last 15 years, it is that al-Qaida hardliners are so hacked off they are prepared to strap bombs to themselves and kill anyone.

So why doesn't the west do something about the legitimate issues that induce Islamic fundamentalism? Like remove western airbases from Saudi Arabia? Like initiate a Middle Eastern peace talk mechanism involving Hamas, without kowtowing to the US Israeli lobby? It would be much cheaper – in both human and financial terms – than continuing to fight a losing global battle. If we engage and negotiate – fairly and unilaterally – there is no "war on terror".

Nick Hopewell-Smith

Stradbroke, Suffolk

Responses Worth Foregrounding

2011-05-04T07:48:00.001-07:00

In response to the article in the previous post, John Barton wrote on 3 May:

I am not sure why this article is a must read. It tries to tarnish and defame President Obama by alleging, without factual support, that the US violated international law by not capturing Bin Laden rather than killing him. The author himself, however, provides the obvious answer: Bin Laden "would have refused any offer to surrender. . . ." Indeed, reports regarding the raid confirm that the US forces would have taken Bin Laden into custody if he did not offer resistance (NYT: "American officials insisted they would have taken Bin Laden into custody if he did not resist, although they considered that likelihood remote. 'If we had the opportunity to take Bin Laden alive, if he didn’t present any threat, the individuals involved were able and prepared to do that,' Mr. Brennan said."). When a criminal who has killed thousands of innocent people chooses to die rather than surrender and submit to the legal process, President Obama is correct when he states that justice has been done.

To which MR responded:

Thank you, John. What you say is quite true. But what is at stake here in my view calls the whole notion of justice into question and goes far beyond the issue of bin Laden or a putative trial. It is not a question of whether Obama (whom I support wholeheartedly) was right or wrong—and the planning of this action seems to have been considered and expertly brought off. If it needed to be done, hats off to him for doing it well and guiding it with a firm and considered hand. But the image of Americans (and I am one) acting like Munchkins at the death of the Wicked Witch of the East is all too apt, too typical—mindless and shortsighted. And why should anyone rejoice at another's death? Grieve, rather, over the human brokenness that makes such a military action necessary. The revenge mentality is the same mentality that was behind the disastrous retaliatory hit on Iraq after 9/11 on the trumped up excuse of weapons of mass destruction. I'm not sorry Saddam is gone, but look what a mess has been left in the wake of this un-thought-through intervention. This revenge mentality is the same mentality that underlies the death penalty, still in force in a country that regards itself as civilised. And every execution further degrades America and our humanity. While eliminating bin Laden may have been a strategic necessity, and while he was a symbolic figurehead of a terrorist mentality, the USA historically has been all too eager to engineer or carry out the removal of leaders of governments, whether or not they have been responsible for attacking the USA directly: Allende, for example, Lumumba. One then might ask, if the action against bin Laden was justified, why hasn't the black ops brigade gone after Mugabe or Assad, both of whom have murdered thousands of their own people? Why were governments so slow—perhaps too late—to respond to the slaughter in Libya? In Ivory Coast? Few people would weep at the death of any of these tyrants; even so, rejoicing would still not be appropriate. Rejoice, rather, at the gift of opportunity for freedom and the creation of a system of real justice. Such situations as that concerning bin Laden are so extreme that the very notion of 'justice' is badly skewed—to the point that it is questionable whether the word should be used at all. I would rather Obama had said something like 'the situation has changed', or shifted, or resolved, or some other neutral word or phrase that did not claim any moral high ground. I would rather that Americans had mourned their dead anew and honoured their troops, than dance on bin Laden's watery grave. It's the triumphalism I find so appalling. And while this operation was sophisticated and by all accounts necessary, it is uncomfortably close to the wild west mentality that has motivated the USA to act in far less appropriate circumstances.

To which John Barton graciously responded on May 4:

Mea culpa. I again mistakenly believed that White House statements are entitled to the presumption of truth. The Times this morning is reporting that bin Laden was unarmed when he was killed. Even though the White House indicates that does not mean that he surrendered, it certainly appears that he could have been taken alive rather easily, although I guess if I were a Navy Seal that would be a difficult judgment to make. I, like many Americans, again feel let down by an administration in which we had put such great hopes. The only consolation is that the matter was clarified quickly and not buried as I probably would have been under other Presidents. Thank you very much for your insightful response to my reply to your post yesterday. I certainly agree with your analysis of our country’s reaction to bin Laden’s death and our sense of triumphalism. My only defense would be that, while the media focused on the “Munchkins”, many others had a more muted, thoughtful and nuanced response as I am sure you aware. Hopefully, our country (and the world) will ultimately realize the cycle of violence must be broken if we are find the peace for which we all yearn. I look forward to reading your future posts, which I enjoy so much.

Comment on Osama Bin Laden's Death

2011-05-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

Here is an article everyone should read: www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/geoffrey-robertson-why-its-absurd-to-claim-that-justice-has-been-done-2278041.html

'Every man's death diminishes me' — and that includes bin Laden's.

Wisdom from P.D. James, the Abbot Tashi, and Langland

2011-05-02T02:09:00.000-07:00

Death in Holy Orders, Penguin, 2001, p. 180, p. 537.

'Father Sebastian said, "What is it that you want? A Church without mystery, stripped of that learning, tolerance and dignity that were the virtues of Anglicanism? A Church without humility in the face of the ineffable mystery and love of Almighty God? Services with banal hymns, a debased liturgy, and the Eucharist conducted as if it were a parish bean-feast? A Church for Cool Brittannia?"

Not that I have any sympathy with the sort of misogynistic attitudes and ecclesiology represented by Fr Sebastian and the fictional St Anselm's.

And James succinctly describes our present cultural decline:: '"[We] live in a dying civilization . . . . the death of beauty, of scholarship, of art, of intellectual integrity . . ."'

To which could be added another thought for which, alas, I cannot find the source: that 'elitism' is today frequently used as a euphemism to denigrate education and the pursuit of wisdom, while simultaneously attempting to excuse the speaker's/writer's own laziness and loutishness.

The charge of elitism also has been used over the centuries as an indictment of pure contemplation of the sort described by the Cloud-author. People may be quite willing to start out on the adventure, but when they find that not only is the goal not to acquire pleasurable or extravagant or 'special' experiences but rather to relinquish all claims to experience, whether 'good' or 'bad'; that contemplation requires a radical interior simplicity that will—because the distinction of 'interior' and 'exterior' is a false one—of necessity require an equally radical shift in living conditions, friends, activities, they are unwilling to pay the price. They love too much the chains of their limited perspective. Alas, they do not realize that if they had not counted the cost, a way of being in the world far more wonderful than any isolated 'experience' or lifestyle would have been theirs.

Colin Thubon received insights similar to those of the Cloud-author from the Buddhist abbot, Tashi (To a Mountain in Tibet, Chatto and Windus 2011, p. 135-136), although the tantric method may seem, at a superficial level, quite different from that described by The Cloud of Unknowing:

'. . .The gods were only guides to the enlightenment that would erase them. His [the abbot's] arms unfolded impotently from his chest, trying to explain. "I think it is a science. Anyone can do it. I think you can do it. . . ." But tantrism [the marriage of wisdom and compassion] was a way to be lived, Tashi said, not a doctrine to be learnt. You could not know it until you experienced it. Though by then, perhaps, it would be too late to return.

'He said: "In this meditation you find above all great strength and eventual peace, the peace we all seek. Once you start out yes, you know it will be foolish to give up. You will lose too much . . . nothing would be left."'

Plus ça change . . .

Here is Liz Herbert McAvoy on Langland's Piers Plowman (Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy, University of Wales press, Cardiff, 2008, p. 2.):

'At the opening of the Prologue to Piers Plowman, William Langland firmly establishes the vocation of the solitary as offering an ideal for the faithful to follow and throughout the poem it is the anchorite who consistently manages to escape the poet's acerbic criticism of religious and social hypocrisy, self-seeking narcissism, and degenerate consumerism.'

Or, to draw on a draft of the paper I am working on for July, 'It is only by accessing the silence and allowing it to do its work that human beings can come to the 'kynde knowyng' that Langland's Will so greatly desired, and which Holy Church so signally failed to teach him. It is only by learning to drawing one's life from this kynde knowyng that the outward forms of living change, not the other way around (Cloud ch. 61; 63/11-13).' (citing 'Langland's "Kynde Knowyng" and the Quest for Christ' by Britton J. Harwood, Modern Philology, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Feb. 1983), pp. 242-255.)

Magic Eye = Kenotic Eye

2011-04-30T04:58:00.000-07:00

A sermon broadcast from St George's Chapel, Windsor, on Easter Day, was revelatory about the state of religious mis-understanding, the state of some clergy and the institutional church at large.

It began in hope: the analogy the preacher used was a good one. He described the 'magic eye' 3D images hidden in 2D patterns that were very popular several decades ago and have never entirely disappeared. The preacher said that he had never been able to see one of the 3D images. Whether this was true or just a trope is impossible to know, but if it is true, it says that this person doesn't know how or when to let go. I found this need continually to control enormously sad.

He went on to say that the disciples had trouble recognising the risen Christ. He said that seeing the risen Christ is not through a magic eye; the only way to see is with through the eyes of belief. I almost cried. Propositional belief, while sometimes necessary, closes the eyes.

For the magic eye is a kenotic eye, an eye of faith. In order to see the 3D image one has to stop searching for it and allow it to emerge from the pattern. It's an excellent example of the paradox of intention essential to communication between the superficial, self-conscious mind and the deep brain. The kenotic eye is essential for restoring this communication, which we allow the noise and frenetic activity of our culture to shut off.

Restoring the circulation between deep silence and our everyday awareness is the purpose of the spiritual life. It is by 'putting on the mind'—or in this case, the eyes—of Christ (Phil. 2:5-11) that we see the risen Christ. As Julian says, 'And then our lord opened my gostly eye and shewid me my soule in midds of my herte'. To see the risen Christ at work in the world means that we must stop trying to control the world: it is rather through kenotic receptivity, beholding, that we create a welcoming space of opportunity in which this mystery can reveal itself.

Resurrection is possible only because of Jesus' utter kenosis, his beholding; his self-emptying is the en-Christing process, an act of faith for which there is no guarantee of resurrection (the verb for 'therefore' in Phil. 2:5-11 has the sense of a held breath, not of QED). And it is only by becoming like him that we can see him.

May You Have a Blessed Triduum and Eastertide

2011-04-19T13:39:00.001-07:00

Gentle Readers,

The next post will be at the end of April, as for the next ten days or so I will not have access to the internet.

May you have a most blessed Triduum and Eastertide

Maggie

Four Elements of Deep Silence: Fire

2011-04-16T23:58:00.000-07:00

We must remember that these are not tears of sorrow only, but both sorrow and joy. As Isaac says, 'here is sweet and flaming compunction'; or, to use the image of John Climacus, mixed like honey and the comb. Mixed because in this singularity we somehow come to know more and more (in the most intimate biblical sense) that we gaze upon the face of God (Matthew 18). The promises made for us in baptism are fulfilled in us by this new and unceasing pouring out of fiery tears through our life within the blessed Trinity, whose love has become the polarity in this unending exchange of kenosis. This is the baptism of tears. The dark glass through which we see is washed by tears that magnify the face of God as we behold. And the only sin of which we need repent is turning away from this beholding.

We come to know that in this singularity we are brought to the freedom and possibility of the primordial moment of creation. We know that water and fire are one, that our tears ignite God's fire upon the earth. Syriac literature and liturgies are full of this knowledge:

Behold, Fire and Spirit in the womb that bore you!
Behold, Fire and Spirit in the river where you were baptised!
Fire and Spirit in our Baptism;
In the Bread and in the Cup, Fire and Holy Spirit!

Tears break open our stony hearts; they become alabaster boxes from which the oil of the Spirit's anointing is poured upon the earth. We begin to understand that our tears, like the water Elijah poured on the fire, ignite the baptism of fire which Christ has promised, salting creation with fire; his apophatic fire breaks out from all things.

As we pass through the strait place, we not only are drawn, we become impelled by the gaze of Love into infinite possibility of transfiguration. We become so found in God that self-reflection becomes less necessary and less possible. Our only security is the insecurity of listening unknowing, and then acting in faith on what is heard and given. Our prayer is being prayed. Our only perception is nonexperience. Our longing no longer seeks fulfillment, indeed, it is no longer noticed as longing.

In the end the way of tears and fire is a commitment not to have any way; not to have any way, that is, except God's way, that remains unknown until it is unfolded in the silence of mingled divine and human kenosis. In the words of Isaac of Nineveh:
From stillness a man can gain possession of the three (causes of tears): love of God, awestruck wonder at his mysteries, and humility of heart. Without these it is unthinkable that a man should be accounted worthy to taste of the wellspring of flaming compunction arising from the love of God. There is no passion so fervent as the love of God. O Lord, deem me worthy of this wellspring!

[from Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding by Maggie Ross, publication 20 May, 2011]

Four Elements of Deep Silence: Water

2011-04-12T04:04:00.000-07:00

"Be praised my Lord for Sister Water who is very useful to us, and humble and precious and pure. . . "—but like most translations, this one (and all the English ones I've read) doesn't quite convey what St Francis had in mind. The Italian word that is translated with the word 'pure' is in fact nubile, from which we get our word 'nubile'. The Italians are much less shy about the fecundity of purity than the British and the Americans, for the word carries not only a sense of purity but someone in full blush of ripe womanhood, beautiful in youth, as yet innocent, a potential giver of life—all these nuances and more wrapped in this single musical word that in itself sounds like clear water running over pebbles.

Water: I'm a shameless over-user of the word 'wellspring' for the water of life welling up in deep silence, in the hidden heart, but I beg my readers' indulgence, for it has a particular meaning for me. In the early 80s (see Seasons of Death and Life) I lived in a cabin in a wild ravine. The neighbours ran to lions, bears, bobcats, wild boar, deer, coyotes, raccoons, rattlesnakes and innumerable birds. My only source of water was a spring across the creek and halfway up the side of the next mountain. Someone had developed this spring with great and loving care. The basin was hewn from the rock. At one end it narrowed. A filter had been inserted to protect it from debris and contamination; a pipe ran from the filter into a 10,000 gallon redwood tank. During the parched summers its overflow valve was one of the only hidden water sources for wildlife for miles around.

The basin was covered by a redwood lid, concealed by tarps, the whole weighed down by several large rocks to keep it from being dislodged by wind and large animals. The first time I lifted everything off and gazed into the pool it was if I became rooted to the spot [yes, Bo, like Daphne]. Sunlight seeped through Douglas fir and madrone. It gilded the water which seemed utterly still but was welling strongly from the rock. Yet the sun was feeble compared to the eldritch light coming from within the spring itself, holding me in thrall. The spring became the centre of my forest universe; it seemed that my whole purpose for being there, my entire reason for living was to guard that spring and its secret. It was metaphor come alive, a wellspring in deed.

Water is nubile, life-giving, in all its forms: to the bacteria that live around steam vents in ocean trenches; to the redwoods for whom fog is more essential than rain; to the beetles in the Namibian desert who manage to thrive among the dunes on the single drops of water that form in morning condensation along the Skeleton Coast. Water is music and melody. The Alhambra haunts my dreams; perhaps one day I will wander there before I die.

I began to understand some of the desert images when I lived for a short while in the Middle East. Beyond the compound, wasteland shimmered with heat. The chief joy of the day was to wander as evening fell among the roses as they emerged from their daytime stasis, beginning to breathe their moist coolness into the atmosphere.

One day we hiked to a remote monastery, miles through red rock, following an artificial watercourse clinging to a sheer escarpment, a humble aqueduct maintained for millennia. Precious and pure . . . . Days later we washed the sandy grit off in a shower, not the Jordan . . . but that journey taught us the blessing of thirsty and parched, so that we might know the joy, the nubile of Sister Water.

Baptism is but a token, as the early Syriac writers knew. The real baptism is of tears, which still our interior noise and erase what we have smeared on our soul's mirror. Weeping leaves us emptied out, vulnerabile, nubile, plunged into the deep that has called to our deep, and salted us with fire.

Four Elements of Deep Silence: Air

2011-04-06T00:37:00.000-07:00

Deep silence as air: two apparently differing metaphorical universes come immediately to mind, neither of which is, strictly speaking, biblical or liturgical. One is found in the poetry of Gerard Manly Hopkins. Spirit breathes through his words, always airy: windhover; breath and bread; wild aire . . .nestling . . . everywhere; wound with mercy . . .as if with air; freshness deep down things. . ./ah! bright wings. The other metaphorical universe exalts in Ralph Vaughan Williams' 'Lark Ascending', golden shimmer of ecstasy under azure skies. Paradoxical, perhaps, to think of silence-as-air in words on the one hand and music on the other, yet both Hopkins and Williams draw deep silence through their art into our everyday world so that we may behold it.

A discussion of the reality of nothing (no, really!) on TV—this was a programme that demonstrated that while generally speaking there is nothing on TV, there is occasionally a programme worth watching if its subject is nothing, which proves much more interesting than the programmes pretending to say something . . . . oh well, you get the drift! This programme suggested a quantum analogy for air as deep silence . . .though there is always the danger with physics that someone will think the physical can prove the metaphysical.

It turns out that absolute emptiness, a vacuum, is alive with energy, and that something, matter, arises from this energy that is alive in nothing. The theory seems to be that this energy manifests as electrons and anti-electrons, always on the move; when they chance to collide they annihilate each other and the cycle begins again. Somehow, very rarely, a positive electron survives, and it is these survivors that make up all the matter in the universe. [I have a problem with this theory: how do the positive ones survive? but perhaps there isn't an answer.] May 22: the answer is asymmetry.

The question arises: is there a me and an anti-me that meet in the silence and annihilate each other? do enough particles of me survive in the silence to make an unfolding truth that becomes manifest in the world? is this unfolding self determined by intention meeting grace, as the Cloud-author hints? or to look at it another way, is the construct that issues from self-consciousness anti-me, which, when it is given over to the silence meets me and is annihilated? does enough of me survive to make it into the real world? I am being absurd.

The breath of God blows where it will; its passing goes unremarked, its effects are life-changing. The primordial Spirit breathes over the deep, breathes ever-renewing creation deep in the silence in our souls; gusts silent laughter in divine play. It dances with earth, fire and water; exhales the still, small voice.

Post-Partum

2011-03-31T05:40:00.000-07:00

I stayed home from the library today because of the violent wind—and also to see if I could get to the end of the parallel text project. Suddenly I heard a clattering sound; I thought the person whose long-term guest I am might have come home early from the conference she is attending. But no, it was the postman. Among the letters was a white padded envelope. I opened it to find . . . an advance copy of my new book, Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding.

It's a strange, strange experience—at least for me—to receive the first bound copy of a book I have written or translated. The emotions are all mixed up together: gladness-grief; welcome-alienation; gratitude-embarrassment—though childless, it always bestows a vague sense of why women go into post-partum depression. I don't know if there is a preventative for mothers, but for writers it is prophylactic to have already begun the next project, which, thankfully, I have.

Gladness because the publisher did such a good job cramming it into 128 pages and thereby keeping the price down; grief over the fact that books are never finished: they are abandoned, and whatever good this one contains is in spite of me. Welcome to a new literary child in the world; alien in the sense that the writer never really knows where the writing comes from. Gratitude for people who have taught, mentored and encouraged me, for the life I've survived thus far that has given rise to the book, for the lives of those who will read it; embarrassment because this blog sometimes reveals the darker side of the author and the matters the book addresses—maybe, in the end not such a bad thing.

It is such a strange time for religion, for religious writing. There is so much fluff, so much wishful thinking, so much grandstanding and band-wagoning, so much violence, verbal and otherwise; and while all this is going on, there is also a huge population of large-hearted, intelligent people engaged in deep questioning, who are undeterred from the hope of finding a better way to manifest the silent and hidden beauty of divine love in all that is.

Upon these waters this book is cast; may it bless and be blessed.

[Published May 20, 2011; available to pre-order from Amazon.co.uk]

Four Elements of Deep Silence: Earth

2011-03-29T04:04:00.000-07:00

Working on The Cloud of Unknowing has given rise to many thoughts that don't have direct bearing on the text itself. One of these is that metaphors that gesture towards the deep silence, where the Holy Spirit does the work of transfiguration, at various times employ the imagery of the four elements which ancient and medieval people thought were the building-blocks of all that exists.

Way back in the middle of the 20th century people got very excited about Tillich's phrase 'ground of being'. He was, of course, drawing on German philosophy; but the phrase has many ancient and medieval antecedents. Julian of Norwich speaks of the 'ground of beseking' (often mistranslated as 'beseeching'). God as 'ground' is also an image beloved of Eckhart, and St Paul as well.

There is a certain rationale behind the use of such an earthy image to gesture towards what is utterly imageless. One thinks of the streets of solid gold in Rev. 21, which are also somehow translucent. Paradoxes such as these stop the mind momentarily, and encourage liminality. But there is also a theological sensibility that attaches to them, and it's one that the Cloud-author stresses in his chapters (50s) that deal with the literal-minded, who contort themselves into all sorts of odd behaviour in their desire to imitate the metaphorical words 'up' and 'in'. It's the notion that in God there is no direction, no geometry; the only security is to give up security, to free-fall in the love of God, as it were. The foundation is laid by giving up foundations—one thinks of the several biblical references to the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone.

Once again the metaphor reflects reality: in space-time too there is no 'up' or 'down'. One tantalizing aspect of the Cloud-author's world-view is that it is Copernican (Walsh) a hundred years before Copernicus himself. This knowledge makes the Cloud-author's remarks about direction take on a double, if not a triple aspect. Anyone who has practiced one-pointed meditation (the beginning first step of what the Cloud-author is talking about) will understand what he means about any direction being the same as any other, that direction in this context becomes meaningless.

The Cloud-author pushes even an extreme apophaticist like me. As I read him over and over (as he advises), creating a parallel text of different versions, the process opens up meanings, not only those that insist that nothing means nothing (this morning I woke up with a catchphrase in my mind: 'if there's excessus, there's no mentis') but also the biblical allusions to death and resurrection that occur towards the end of the Cloud chapters numbered in the fifies and the early sixties.

It is in deep silence that we shall all be changed; in fact, it almost seems as if the Cloud-author is saying of what he self-deprecatingly calls an 'exercise' that it is, in fact, a matter of life and death. The choice to behold that the people in the desert refused is always available to us in the deeps. We make that choice for life or death by intention: are we willing to cast our intention in to the abyss of love along with our thoughts, ideas and all our preconceptions; are we willing to be attentively receptive to the life that emerges in response? or will we intend to remain in the idolatry of the construct we have created, the pseudo-security of what we think we know? a construct whose maintenance demands that we squander all our energy, but which will shatter at the slightest provocation? Holden Caulfield would call this construct our 'phoniness' but the irony is that not only it is all we have to offer, it is the gift that God wants us to offer, so that stripped of it, we become available to the transfigurative process that in turn will inform the constructs we need to create to function in the presenting world.

It can't be emphasized often enough that regaining the balance that is normative for human beings—beholding, to use the biblical term—is not a matter of choosing either experience or deep silence; it's rather a matter of re-establishing the circulation between the two, between the true origin of our shared nature with God, and our engagement with time—for which we need constructs. What is different when we have recovered that balance is that these constructs become informed by the silence; they're no longer trying to feed off their own vacuity but are given life from the primordial love that is beholding. The liminal area between the cloud of forgetting and the cloud of unknowing becomes the arena of communication, of receptivity and creativity.

Earth images: there have been catastrophic earthquakes recently as tectonic plates slip past one another and seek to release tension. By analogy there is tension and stress within our selves created by the slippage between the construct and the reality, the fault-lines between our self-consciousness and deep silence. Unlike the slippage of the tectonic plates, which is natural, our slippage is unnatural; it needs to be justified so that we can regain our nature, function optimally within our selves and with each other, so that the life we share with God emerges into the everyday.

The earth will keep moving, and so will we. The tensions and stresses caused by the tectonic plates will not be relieved; they will only be displaced to build again until the next cataclysm. By contrast, as the Cloud-author notes, the movement and justification that humans undergo through healing transfiguration in deep silence is a kind of rest, where tension and stress will fade away; where sorrow and pain will be no more; and where every eye will be wiped of every tear.

Exotic Religion

2011-03-22T04:22:00.000-07:00

I have been working on the chapters in The Cloud of Unknowing where the author is at his most satirical. Wildly funny, in fact. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. His depiction of the antics of those he calls the 'devil's contemplatives', and his likening of what happens to those who try to take what they think are short cuts to life in God, to a devil with a single expanded nostril up which you can look to see the fires of hell, which are his brains, would make great commedia dell'arte. (One can also imagine he was thinking of a different orifice, as depicted in the margins of the psalters of his day).

His account of those who 'wear their fringes long' (Matthew 23:5) in the words of today's reading at Morning Prayer, their pompous behaviour and the like can still be seen in many of today's churches. There's no escape from long fringes even at 7 AM on a weekday morning here in Oxford. On the way home after the Office, today, I followed someone on the pavement (sidewalk) in a cassock and short cape who fit the Cloud-author's description of the po-faced to a T.

Here is a sample from Spearing's translation: 'These people will care more and lament more for an ill-regulated look, or a disagreeable or unsuitable word spoken in public, than they will for a thousand empty thoughts and stinking stirrings of sin willingly indulged in or heedlessly spewed up in the sight of God and the saints and angels in heaven.' And Johnston's: "Ah, Lord God! Surely a great deal of humble affectation denotes a proud heart."

While the Cloud-author's raillery is hilarious, his point is serious: life in God is normative, not exotic, not eccentric. People who live in God from the wellspring of silence are people who not only behave normally but also people who become immensely attractive to other sincere seekers. They don't need to wear special clothes; they don't need to stick their noses in the air or patronise others; it's not about what they can get (especially attention) but what they can give, i.e., welcome and breathing space and silence. It's not about looking for experiences but about relinquishing all claims to experience so that God can create something new.

One of the liturgical blessings used during Lent speaks of 'taking up your cross', a phrase often grossly misinterpreted as doing precisely what Matthew and the Cloud-author are objecting to. Far from 'giving up' some treasured delicacy for 40 days, or publicly wearing sack-cloth and ashes to show the world that one is fasting, to take up one's cross is, instead, one of those liminal paradoxical phrases that means dispossession, even, or especially, of one's ideas about the cross (one thinks of eye-rolling, effusive renditions of 'When I survey the wondrous cross'); just as the phrase 'clinging to God' when used in the context of contemplation means clinging to dispossession, especially of one's ideas about God.

For Lent I wish the church would take up its cross and dispossess itself of the seven Ps (see my paper "The Seven Devils of Women's Ordination" in Crossing the Boundary, by S. Waldron-Skinner)—pompousness, privilege, preferment, etc. It would also be salutary if the clergy would look at the simpering and flouncing, noses in the air, and lack of discretion in dressing up that goes on. Oh yes: it would also be nice if they got over their allergy to paying lay people for their expertise, and their contempt for the laity in general.

Of course the laity are complicit in not calling the institution to account, and now it is probably too late: the clergy are deaf. It is not too late, however, to call our selves to account, to ask our selves whether we are taking what the Cloud author calls the easy path to hell instead of the hard road to heaven. Forget about the institution; it will only become more and more irrelevant as it most certainly doesn't want the hard road to God and has forgotten how to teach it. Read Chapters 50-56 of the Cloud: you will laugh, but if you really understand them, you will cringe as well.

Vanity vs Meaningless

2011-03-15T03:44:00.001-07:00

The bible translation scattered around the church where the KJV reading took place was the NIV supplied by the Gideons. I happened to pick one up out of curiosity during the reading of Ecclesiastes, and almost immediately put it down again when I saw that it translated 'vanity' as 'meaningless'. It seemed to me that this was the translator's feeling about Ecclesiastes projected into the translation more than it was a reflection of what the text says.

It wasn't only the syntactic shift that bothered me; it seemed yet another example of the lack of sensitivity to the psychology and the resonance of observations about people that are as operative today as they were in biblical times. Plenty of people find what they think of as meaning in vanity, at least for a time, even if it is negative meaning. To live a life based on vanity may in the end lead to a sense of meaninglessness, but it is not in itself meaningless: it bestows pseudo-meaning. Vanity and meaninglessness at least share one thing: narcissism.

Not only is the Hebrew clear that what is meant by vanity is vanity—and the bible contains some delicious examples of vanity—but the word also has nuances of breath, of the ephemeral; in the case of vanity, we might say, a construct. In addition, there is the implicit and fundamental question, which is one of the foundational questions of the entire bible, of orientation: inward or outward? self or God? As the Psalmist says (119:37, Coverdale/Tyndale): O turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity; and quicken thou me in thy way. Turn me away from what is ephemeral to what is enduring.

There is a terrible insecurity in vanity, if not self-hatred. For the beautiful woman who is vain, there is the threat of losing that beauty and being loved for appearance instead of substance. For the person vain about a skill, there is the fear that someone else will be better or that his value as a person is tied to his performance. The same dynamic applies to wealth, as the Preacher observes: a poor man who has done a day's honest labour will sleep soundly, while a rich man's abundance will keep him awake at night (5:12). Life can be taken away in an instant. Many people find Preacher tedious, but his purpose is to teach what he has discovered as king: that even the trappings of kingship are nothing unless 'God answereth him in the joy of his heart.' (Eccles. 5:20)

True seeking into the beholding of God changes one physically, as writers of every age and epoch including the Preacher (8:1) and the Cloud-author (Ch. 61) have observed; the beauty is God's. (2Cor 3:18)

The question of meaning or meaninglessness is a false question, just as the question of happiness or unhappiness is a false question. The person leading a meaningful life does not think to ask it, nor does the one who knows the 'joy of his heart' ask herself if she is happy.