Conclusion - Receiving
This book has sought to us into silence because silence is the place of seeing and seeing is receiving. As Van Morrison sang in ‘Summertime in England’ when we go through the veil or cross the threshold into silence it’s no longer about why’s and wherefore’s, questions and answers, but is simply about being, about what is. In the stillness, in the silence, in contemplation, is where we see God, creation, others and ourselves, receiving their essence and blessing. We enter a place that is no longer about us - our needs, our questions, our intercessions – but instead is about the other, seeing and receiving what is around and outside of us, but offered to us.
That is where the different journeys of this book wish to take us. The 7 S’s are practices shared by art and contemplative prayer which seek to lead us into seeing. My sabbatical art pilgrimage was to churches that sought to find contemporary expressions of spirituality in order to assist worshippers and visitors in either beginning or deepening this journey. As with Betty Spackman’s A Creature Chronicle there is circularity to these journeys which, because they end in the sparking of new creativity through the Holy Spirit, generate new works that can begin the cycle for us and for others all over again.
Rowan Williams' book Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert takes its title from a story about two of the Desert Fathers:
‘… two large boats floating on the river were shown to him. In one of them sat Abba Arsenius and the Holy Spirit of God in complete silence. And in the other boat was Abba Moses, with the angels of God; they were all eating honey cakes.’[i]
A man visits the desert fathers and experiences two approaches to spirituality. One involves abstinence, particularly from speech (silence), while the other involves an open welcome, enjoyment of company and the eating of honey cakes. The man expresses a preference for the latter, which leads another to question how such different paths to God can exist. He then receives a vision in which God accepts both.
Rowan Williams explores this story in terms of our different vocations. I would like to think about it in terms of the two different ways to God that the story juxtaposes.
In one we find God in the world around of us - the people, places, creatures and creations. In addition we use these things as visual or lingual images which reveal aspects of God to us. This is an affirmative way based on the understanding that God's creation is good and that something of the creator can be seen in the creation. This is a way of abundance and of the Arts, where multiple images and experiences build up a composite picture of God. This is the way of Abba Moses in the boat together with honey cakes and the angels of God.
The other way is visualised by Abba Arsenius who is silent in his boat with the Holy Spirit of God. This is the way of abstinence which recognises the inadequacy of every image and word and creature and creation to show or tell us about God. God is always more than any way of describing or imaging him and, therefore, the best way to experience God as is, is to dispense with words and images altogether and go by way of silence and darkness. As a result, this way of experiencing God is known as the negative way or also, sometimes, as the dark night of the soul. While the way of abundance is more easily and readily reflected in the Arts, the Arts can and do engage also with the negative way, as is evidenced by the fact that the phrase ‘dark night of the soul’ derives from a poem by St John of the Cross.
Both ways lead to God, but, as they are polar opposites, they approach God by different routes and therefore we may, at times, have to choose between them and, if we were to follow either to their conclusion, we would have to make an ultimate choice, as Abba's Arsenius and Moses seem in the story to have done. However, it is also possible to combine aspects of both approaches or to follow one way rather than the other at different seasons in our lives.
My thinking about these two ways to God has been informed by that of the poet, dramatist and novelist Charles Williams. His views on these two ways have been summarised as follows:
‘The Way of Affirmation consists in recognizing the immanence of God in all things, and says that appreciation of whom and what God has made may lead us to appreciation of Himself. The Way of Rejection concentrates on the transcendence of God, the recognition that God is never fully contained in His creation; it says that we must renounce all lesser images if we would apprehend His. These two Ways have been expressed by the paradox "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou," and tend generally to illustrate, respectively, Catholic or Protestant thought in their attitudes toward the use of images.
While Williams insists that a complement of both these Ways is necessary to the life of every Christian, and that none of us can walk the Kingdom's narrow road by only affirming or only rejecting ... yet he contends that Christians are usually called primarily to one Way or the other.’ [ii]
While both these ways are ways to God, they are also ways to understanding ourselves; in itself a necessary part of our journey towards God. The greatest commandment is to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Rowan Williams connects these things when he writes that the reason why ‘the desert monks and nuns valued self-awareness’ was that to ‘be a real agent for God to connect with [our] neighbour … each of us needs to know the specific truth about himself or herself.’[iii]
These two different ways to God that we have been considering provide, as you would expect, different ways in which to encounter and understand ourselves. On the Affirmative Way, the pre-eminent metaphor may be that of light. Light enables us to see all that is around us. As a result, we can then also perceive ourselves. When we look around us and see other people, creatures and objects, we can undertake an exercise in comparing and contrasting; thinking to ourselves I’m similar to this and I’m different from that. This can take us right back to the creation stories in Genesis and, in particular, that story of Adam naming the animals. As we have reflected, names in ancient culture were symbols of the essence of the thing named; so, Adam looked at each creature before him seeing its essence and named that characteristic. As he did so, he was himself looking for a helpmate. When he had named all the animals he had still not found his helpmate. The animals were too different to him to fulfil that role but, having encountered difference, he was then immediately able to recognise his similarity to Eve and realise that they were intended to be helpmates for each other.
These thoughts connect with the South African word ‘Ubuntu’, which essentially means ‘I am because you are’, and the phrase ‘I-Thou’ explored by the philosopher Martin Buber, who wrote about ‘the I-Thou relationship, where our human relationships can only be truly authentic when we open ourselves fully to the other and encounter them as whole and unique persons.’ St Anthony the Great spoke about dependency being at the heart of community and our belonging to one another when he said that ‘Our life and our death is with our neighbour’[iv] and, as a result Rowan Williams states that ‘only in the relations we have with one another can the love and mercy of God appear and become effective.’[v]
On the Negative Way, the pre-eminent metaphor for knowing ourselves may be that of silence. In silence, we hear the working of our own minds, we hear our self-justification and unmask our need to defend our territory, establish our position, and defend our ego. As Rowan Williams states, ‘Our words help to strengthen the illusions with which we surround, protect and comfort ourselves; without silence, we shan’t get any closer to knowing who we are before God.’ Our ‘sense of the authentically human, depends and can only depend on the quality of our silence – the need to let go of words in certain ways, that willingness to occupy a space before God which is not a defended territory, defended against God or against anyone else. And because we occupy a space that isn’t a defended territory, it is space both for God and for each other. We are moving beyond our fascination, our hypnosis by the ideas of choice and individuality as conceived in the modern world, moving towards the possibility of a human life characterised by consistent instinctive responsiveness to the truth, acquiring an instinctive taste for truth. A taste for truth, that’s to say an appetite for what is real, so strong that it allows us constantly to keep ourselves in question, under scrutiny, not in an obsessional way but just going on asking, ‘Who is being served here? The ego or the truth?’[vi]
Which boat are we sitting in? In which would we wish to sit? Are our personalities fundamentally compatible with sharing silence or honey cakes? Have we found ways to combine the affirmative and the negative ways or to move between the two at different times and seasons of our lives?
Both are routes to the same place; that place where we encounter God, creation, others and ourselves as each actually is and only for the sake of enjoying each as each is. If we have followed the negative way that will have been achieved by the stripping away of all the instrumental reasons we may have had for encounter. If we have followed the affirmative way that will be because the never-ceasing depth and richness of encounter will have brought us a place of simple and genuine awe and wonder.
Lakwena Maciver’s affirmative artistic practice involves distilling ideas and encapsulating them in a single evocative phrase surrounded by kaleidoscopic patterns and bold colours. Her phrases are painted prayers and meditations, her adornments are signifiers assigning value and glory, her content is future oriented; looking for a future that is ‘higher, deeper, fuller, sweeter, older, newer, bolder, brighter and more glorious.’ This can be clearly seen in the phrases she chooses and uses which include: ‘Looking For A Brighter Day’, ‘Nothing Can Separate Us’, ‘Ever After’, ‘Imagine Eternity’, ‘I Remember Paradise’, ‘Just Passing Through’, ‘The Future’s Gold’, ‘Still I Rise’, ‘Raise Your Hopes’, ‘Your Love Keeps Lifting me Higher’, ‘The Highest Love’, ‘The Best Is Yet To Come’.
The story of her art began with an invitation to paint a mural for a church in Brazil. She chose a verse from the Bible - 'You've turned my wailing into dancing, You’ve taken away my clothes of sadness and clothed me with joy' – painted it on a wall in Portuguese and created patterns around it. It was all very instinctive, but the style and content of her work were essentially formed through that project. The Bible is key for her; she reads it regularly, describes it as her food, and meditates on its words of truth and encouragement. Her creativity begins with prayer, music, meditation, writing, and she then paints from that place.
She says that all her work ‘is really one whole body of work that leads on from one piece to another.’ It began with the book ‘Echoes of Eden’, which talks about the ‘idea of paradise’ and ‘how it pops up in a lot of cultures’. All of her work has flowed, therefore, from the idea of heaven; it’s about the future and our yearning and longing for paradise.
‘Ever After’, a mural in downtown Las Vegas created for the street art festival scene opening up there, has that eternity describing phrase in block letters and rainbow colours set on a future-oriented tyre track vector graphic surrounded by connecting curves of colour. ‘Imagine Eternity’ is a work from the ‘I Remember Paradise’ exhibition at the Papillion Gallery which followed the creation of murals in Miami and Las Vegas. ‘Imagine Eternity’ floats the dream of Paradise over a kaleidoscope which is surrounded again by colour curves topped and tailed with a graphic of a long and winding road. The kaleidoscope draws the eye to a central eternal entry point.
She sees God in the colours of heaven – ‘fluorescent pink and gold and glitter and all of those neon textures’ – making her work a very contemporary expression of worship and thanks and praise. She quotes Calvin Seerveld who said it’s important to ‘fire your art until it emits sparks that warm, or burn, those it reaches.’ The challenge and comfort of her work is in its positivity with rainbow colours of hope and the energy of its patterns and textures.
Lakwena says she sees her work and responsibility as an artist in the terms articulated by Seerveld. As such, the future orientation of her work is a lot deeper than just positivity; just saying things are good or are going to get better. Ultimately, this is work that is rooted both in an Afro-futuristic aesthetic and a Messianic ideology, the idea that there is a Saviour and a kingdom yet to come. As a result, there is a future that’s bigger than the past, the vision of which enables us to live God’s future now.
So, we remind ourselves that in heaven there will be nothing to fix, nothing to solve, and therefore no work to be done. In heaven there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away. In heaven there will be nothing we can do for others, because God will have done everything for us. So, what will there be to do? Heaven is all about our relationships; being with God, with ourselves, with others, and with creation. Heaven is all about receiving from those relationships and enjoying those relationships to the full for what they are.
In Philippians 3 we are told to imitate those who set their minds on heavenly things because our citizenship is in heaven. Citizenship is all about belonging to a particular community together with all the other members of that community. In relation to heaven, it is about being in relationship with God’s people. So, if heaven is about anything at all, it is about enjoying, exploring and receiving through relationships.
Jesus wants us to prepare for heaven. The writer to the Philippians wants us to set our minds on our citizenship in heaven. They call us to live God’s future now, to anticipate what heaven will be like in the here and now, in the present. We do that by prioritising relationships – prioritising our being with God, being with ourselves, being with others and being with creation now. We prioritise relationship by being with, by entering a space in which we can receive what others are.
Contemplative prayer based on the art of looking and seeing puts us in that place where we can receive and enjoy God in a state of not having, not seeing, not knowing, not grasping; God given to us for God’s sake alone, the fullness of God’s being, the abundance of life, the secret of the world’s power of meaning.
Simone Weil wrote that in order ‘to receive in its naked truth’ the object which is to penetrate our mind, ‘our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything’ and that such ‘absolute unmixed attention is prayer.’[vii] When we are in that state, seeing is receiving and to see is this way ‘is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.’[viii]
Look, look, see. Look, look, see.
Be still, still, see. Look long,
look longingly, look lovingly, look deep.
Look slow, look silently, attending.
Stay, sustained, steady, steadfast.
Look, look, see. Surrender. Share.
Prayer. Poetry. Art. Life. Reveal.
Revelation. Sight. Insight. See.
Click here for the other parts of 'Seeing is Receiving'. See also 'And a little child shall lead them' which explores similar themes.
[i] R. Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert, Lion Books, 2004, p.42
[ii] ‘The Nature of the City: Visions of the Kingdom and its Saints in Charles Williams All Hallows' Eve’, A.S. Anderson, in Mythlore, Vol. 15, No. 3 (57) (Spring 1989), p.19
[iii] R. Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert, Lion Books, 2004
[iv] https://sayingsoftheorthodoxfathers.com/2017/09/12/our-life-and-death-is-with-our-neighbour-abba-anthony-the-great/
[v] R. Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert, Lion Books, 2004
[vi] R. Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert, Lion Books, 2004
[vii] S. Weil, Gravity and Grace, Routledge, 2004, p. 117
[viii] J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III, pt. 4, ch. 16 (Knopf, 1794)
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Hildegard von Bingen - Canticles Of Ecstasy.
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