Have been skim reading Stanley Spencer's Letters and Writings (Tate, 2001) which I bought at Tate Modern yesterday. As expected, there are some real gems to be found.
Spencer writes of feeling "that the religious experience & the ordinary life circumstances of my life ... needed to be joined together in a kind of marriage in order that their full meaning could be attained."
We could, he suggests, every day of our lives if we liked have all the joy which Michelangelo's cherubs had of wondering what on earth God was going to create next:
"We could see a man for the first time every time we saw one if we cared to use our imaginative powers which we all possess. I mean with all the freshness & newness of surprise & joy which the cherubs experienced. We could do this by learning to love. Some seem to think that love is a sort of thing that most people go in for; that it makes the 'world go around' or does something equally absurd. But the love I should like to have the pleasure of introducing you to is quite another affair. It is an art, a most difficult & exacting art, & the most sublime of all the arts, because it alone has the power to create, the power to conceive the miraculous, the revealing power ..."
One consequence of this is that "every necessary act performed [such as the washing up at the Beaufort Military Hospital] is like ointment poured forth. Spencer, as he reads St Augustine's confessions, sees that God himself performs such manual acts of service:
"My civilian friend told me to read [St.] Augustine's 'Confession' & in it there is a glorifying God in all his different performances. This struck me very much. 'What art thou, my God ... Most far & yet most near: fairest yet strongest. Fixed yet incomprehensible, unchangeable yet changing all things, never new yet never aged ... Ever busy yet ever at rest. Gathering yet never needing, bearing, filling, guarding, creating, nourishing, perfecting, seeking though thou hast no lack.' And so I thought, 'bearing, filling', coming, going, fetching, carrying, sorting, opening doors, shutting them, carrying tea urns, scrubbing floors, etc. Yes, he was a friend indeed."
Spencer's immediate translation of Augustine's statements about God into his own world of mundane actions reminded me of the following poem that I wrote some time ago:
Slowly becoming aware in the confused, crowded
crush of life of someone serving me. At times
congested by books, people, places to be. At times
hurried, harried and put upon. Times of blind step
by step feeling, times of guilt ridden guilt,
waiting. Times alone, aware. Fun and smiling,
times of failing.
Always someone dusty feet washing, waist-stripped,
kneeling relief. Someone serving me serving, my God!,
my God serving me.
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