Sofia 99 March/April 2011 22 September 1986 Precisely ten years since my commissioning. I have been re-living that service. The hymns:
Be thou my vision, O lord of my heart, Naught be all else to me, save that thou art.
Lift every gift that thou thyself hast given, Low lies the best till lifted up to heaven.
Low lie the bounding heart, the teeming brain, Till, sent from God, they mount to God again.
Kindle a flame of sacred love On the mean altar of my heart.
And my tutor’s words: ‘Preaching is parable, parallel, paradigm.’ I have also been reflecting on two modern hymns:
I ask no dream, no prophet-ecstasies, No sudden rending of the veil of clay, No angel visitant, no opening skies; But take the dimness of my soul away.
To each man in his language, To each man in his home, By many paths and channels The faith of Christ may come.
May I be granted the grace to find each individual’s language – however unchristian – and seek each individual’s ‘home’, the point they’ve arrived at. For the vision, the nourishment, inspiration, encouragement, growth of these ten years – humble and marvelling thanksgiving. As love is bigger than lovers, ministry is bigger than ministers. We are small creatures, pulled by the wind to swell sails hardly our own.
Dr A. J. Gossip on ministry: ‘The whole point of ministry, the reason why there is a ministry at all, is that people out in the press of life and finding that there they cannot keep in sight of God but get continually drifted away from him, that the little matters, to which it is their duty to attend, of necessity crowd him out of their preoccupied minds – lay hands on a man, praying him, ‘Live in the secret of God’s presence; and in the hush there, which we cannot know, commune with him face to face; and week by week, come out and share with us the message which, in that stillness, you have had a chance of hearing.
We’ll pay you for it, man, if you will only do it!’ October 1986 ‘Pilgrimage’ is not an adequate metaphor for commitment. The whole point of pilgrimage is making for a specified spot. One has maps. The commitments I know – love, poetry, faith, ministry – are Abraham’s nomad not-knowing-whitherings. On a geographical pilgrimage, though practical necessities may deflect us, still every decision has reference to the known intention. These commitments of life offer no such guiding principles. Only in retrospect do we discover the route our blind decisions have traced; and we can never locate our destination.
October 1986 At Devoke Water. Brief notes made at the scene:
Air palpable a felt presence as I stepped from the vehicle till that moment no elevated thoughts the ambient presence touched stroked flowed over face neck hands an ancient presence – ‘thousands of years if all were told’ (Yeats) – anonymous but not wholly impersonal. 3–5 October 1986 Some notes from a retreat at the Windermere Centre, led by Benita Kyle. I felt them of sufficient significance to keep them in my journal afterwards:
Caretti: ‘You are not the dawn, you are the land that awaits the dawn. Your God is the dawn, and later he is full daylight, and later still high noon.’ On Adelaide Hill: Sound of cows chewing grass, sharp, incisive, repetitive, like a mantra. I too feed from earth, become earth. Haze on far hills, a meltdown of hills, rock dissolving in air. Silver shimmer on water, horizontals counterpointed by verticals of sailing craft.
Crows freewheeling. Grass studded with gold of ragwort, white of seeded thistles. Breeze disturbs grass, my hair. All things move in God; dance of particles, trajectory of comet, growth decay death birth, love’s interaction. Lord of the dance. Tat Tvam Asi. This I: a collage of memories, sensations, notions. Ground of being, the unchanging ever moving That or Thou.
To be poet first is to establish a criterion of what is real. Religion is a narrower interpretative way of underlining poetic experience – to be rejected where it contradicts poetic experience, enlarged where it is inadequate to poetic experience. Others have other criteria, such as marriage, science, art, philosophy, community.
Part of a Pilgrimage 2 This is Part 2 of long-time SOF member Anne Ashworth’s spiritual journal, covering her hard struggle for honesty during the years 1986 until the beginnings of 1991.
Sofia 99 March/April 2011 16 Meditation is not to learn, but to kindle love, to let the finite expand into the infinite. Three stages: way in, staying in, way out. Way out should always include thought for others. A mantra: win me, wean me, wing me.
Meditation on a silver chalice. Empty. Receptivity. ‘The pool was filled with water out of sunlight’ (Eliot).
Chalice a little tarnished, filled with golden wine ‘out of sunlight’. In meditation turned darker, richer, became flame; a chalice of living fire. Colours began to separate, reds and golds. The meditation of the chalice:
Breathe in the life of God into my emptiness Breathe in the light of God into my darkness Breathe in the fire of God which warms, singes, consumes Breathe in the artistry of God, colour, form, pattern archetype, into my creativity A contemplative explores silence; a poet infringes silence. How can this be resolved? A contemplative ascends the mountain, a poet uses the mountain. To use a third metaphor, both are inward movements, probing inner layers of self to reach and touch that Self, ground of being. Deep in those recesses, closer to truth than the superficial I, is a poet. To deny her validity would be to disengage from the quest, to turn back. These two summoning imperatives, these two primary loves: God and poetry – are they in apposition or in opposition? How can they be opposed? The wellsprings of spirit – illumination, inspiration (metaphors of light or breath) are recognisably the same.
I went to Windermere determined not to make poetic capital out of it, to allow as far as possible no ulterior motives. I found myself instead wrestling with these interior complexities: faiths and certainties which now coalesced, now pulled apart, ranging from synthesis to antithesis.
June 1988 The more I learn from radical and feminist theologians the less I can cope with traditional Christian language, so that it is increasingly difficult for me to attend worship unless I am conducting it. (What arrogance!) So I consider whether in the long term I will be able to stay in the church. In some ways the debate is similar to that regarding choosing to be ordained. At that point the most serious of my objections was a determination to remain, like Simone Weil, ‘at the intersection of Christianity with all that is not Christianity’. That still holds good. I now add to that affirmation the question whether I must forego what I value in corporate Christianity because I can no longer with integrity handle the whole package.
Perhaps it will not come to that. Some Christians at least are becoming more open to other faiths, other philosophies, lifestyles other than the traditional Christian family. But equally there is a recrudescence of fundamentalism, neo-orthodoxy, reactionary moral and political viewpoints, including a new witch hunt against homosexuals. I’m becoming more sensitive (over-sensitive?) to Christian language. It’s sexist or literalist or sub-literate, sometimes all three at once.
Reasons for remaining in the church:
The central points of the myth are profoundly emotive and enriching. Incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection are focal images for psychological healing, more powerful than any others I know.
Public worship is nourishing. I know of no other comparable nourishment. Quaker worship is impoverished by comparison, other fellowships mundane by comparison.
The social ethics of Jesus’ message (as I understand it) of the ‘Kingdom’ provide a necessary disturbing challenge to my idleness, complacency and cowardice.
There are experiences and dimensions of life – in particular, perhaps, the aesthetic – for which only a religious language is rich enough. So it is convenient to have available a public vehicle, the religion of one’s own culture.
February 1990 Two directions of post-Christian theology. Daphne Hampson, describing herself as a ‘post-Christian feminist’, rejects Jesus but keeps God. Don Cupitt, described as a ‘Christian atheist’, rejects God but keeps Jesus. I see both points of view; am slightly more attracted by Cupitt, whose reasoning is better, yet my ‘God-shaped blank’ yearns to retain a spiritual dimension even though the theist view is untenable.
March 1990 From Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: ‘I became more and more conscious of the necessity of a vital faith, and the total unreality and unsubstantiality of the dead, selfish rationalism which had been freezing my mind and will for the last seven years. By the time the summer was over, I was to become conscious of the fact that the only way to live was to live in a world that was charged with the presence and reality of God.’ I still long for the contemplative life and yearn for God, if God there be. Almost an atheist, yet still repeating Tagore’s impassioned plea: ‘That I want thee, only thee, let my heart repeat without end./ All desires that distract me, day and night, are false and empty to the core.’ But I don’t agree with that second line. All good things are to be desired – in art, in nature, in love and fellowship and domesticity and work. Yet through and beyond them all beats and throbs ‘I want thee, only thee.’ And over against all other desires, the pull to withdrawal, to solitude, to contemplation. But how?
What is one to ‘contemplate’ if reason demands the relinquishment of all supernaturalism?
Sofia 99 March/April 2011 March 1990 Shall I disengage from the church? From its naivety, its parochial exclusiveness, its limited spirituality based on untenable philosophy? Once I thought Christianity could provide a language to interpret spiritual experience, and a vehicle within which to develop it.
That was liberating. Twenty years later, I need to be liberated from Christianity. ‘It’s a matter of breaking the pain barrier,’ two people from SOF have said to me. No it isn’t. Would it were so simple, for I could muster courage enough for that. No, it’s the betrayal of others I fear: how can I be responsible for their hurt, their sense of loss? The congregations I have nourished and challenged – if they see me walking away as a renegade their own faith journeys could be endangered. And there is the further question of vocation. Can I be true to my own calling if I leave the church? One does not need a belief in a divine call to acknowledge vocation. Rather, it comes from one’s inner depths. Jeremiah still speaks for me:
If I say, I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name, there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones and I am weary with holding it in and I cannot.
I set myself, long ago, at Simone Weil’s ‘intersection of Christianity with all that is not Christianity’. How do I view that junction now? Must I move away to preserve my integrity, or remain and – as on a cross! – be destroyed?
Richard MacKenna in God for Nothing asks: ‘Wouldn’t it be a Christian success story if someone came to church regularly and then decided, on mature reflection, that they couldn’t accept the Christian viewpoint? Shouldn’t we be glad that they care enough to wrestle with the problems and then come to a decision which they feel makes sense for them? Better, surely, an empty church and a body of people who have left it, caring, compassionate, open to life and others, than a church full of people meekly obeying orders and dutifully taking their elixir.’ January 1991 Extracts from what began as a letter, was never sent, and developed into a lengthy self-examination, kept in the journal:
A dark night of the soul? My soul doesn’t aspire to the lofty reaches of a John of the Cross, though there have been periods when I think I believed I had something of the gifts of a mystic. Nor, even if I were to use the phrase in its trampled-upon everyday sense of ‘depression’, am I subject to the fairly normal ravages of low spirits. My life is well ordered, comfortable, cheerful and as happy as any human can hope for.
What then? Let me approach the question by indirections.
Ideas and language have been my life, or its most vital part. So like all ‘people whose business is words’ I have wrestled often with the nightmare beastie, the shapeless horror – the fear that words can’t do the job.
Words distort. Words obfuscate. Words confuse.
Words always mean something other to the reader or hearer anyway, and we have no control over that.
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. Shrieking voices Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, Always assail them. (Eliot) Beneath ideas and language, or beyond and encompassing, or behind them – let whatever preposition best makes the metaphor be selected – has been the single basic concept: Honesty. My life has been a long losing battle for honesty (as at least two of my poems have proclaimed). And the problem of precision in words has been a part of that battle, a sharpening of swords as you might say.
At those periods when honesty has seemed impossible to me, words have failed me. During a lengthy sleep, the fifteen years or more when I was absent from myself (though to outward appearance in the prime of early adulthood, fit and vigorous and always learning), I did not write at all. Though I still read poetry, I lost all notion of writing it. The creative self was sound asleep, fearing to wake. When, at age forty, it woke, the words began again; so did everything else, everything that pertains to the soul and its wakeful functions.
Religious experience began again; love, writing, individuality.
Honesty was a hard taskmaster. It led me out of a comfortable marriage. It led me out of the unpolitical myopia of the unquestioning petit bourgeois. It led me into the pulpit and other uncongenial places. But every fresh venture was a fresh point of disillusion, for each time I was stepping, not as I hoped out of darkness into light but into yet another Chinese box of dishonesty. No sooner had the words been sharpened sufficiently to articulate a new position than that position ceased to be entirely tenable.
Jugglers improve with practice. My wordmanipulation improved, of course. My poetry got better, so did my preaching. So did my self-critical judgment. Each poem, each sermon, because it could articulate only one truth, was false by definition. Every statement, even the carefully symmetrical paradoxes, left so much unsaid and unsayable that honesty grew fainter than ever in the distance.