Conversation as communion

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Andrew's Wickford this morning:

In the Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke - Jesus is portrayed as a teller of pithy and pointed stories but in John’s Gospel this is not the case and, instead, Jesus is portrayed as engaging in conversation with those around. Nathanael, Mary, the mother of Jesus, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, the crowds of Jews and their leaders, Mary and Martha, and Pilate are all examples of people who are recorded as having significant conversations with Jesus.

Like them, the writer of this Gospel has entered into conversation with God himself and has entered “into the maturity and fullness of the Lord’s Prayer as a dialogue between Father and Son” learning to listen as well as to speak, “as Jesus listened to the Father and offered himself to bring to carry out the secret purpose which the Father could not bring to fruition without him”. For him, as for Jesus, self-consciousness has become prayer – a conversation with God. It is this same conversation into which he, following Jesus, wishes to draw us.

Jesus as God’s Son is in conversation with both God the Father and with God the Spirit. Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished.” (John 5. 17-30)

The Son claims that he hears from the Father and speaks just what the Father has taught him (John 8: 26 – 29). He also claims that his relationship with the Father is not just one way, rather the Father also always hears the Son (John 11: 41 & 42). Similarly, he says that the Spirit will not speak on his own but only what he hears (John 16: 13). The Spirit is sent, like the Son, by the Father, but comes in the name of the Son to remind the disciples of everything that the Son said to them (John 14: 26 & 27). This interplay or dialogue within the Godhead between Father, Son and Spirit can be summed up in the words of John 3. 34-35: “For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God; to him God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.”

John’s Gospel dramatises for us the extent to which Jesus was in the conversation with God and to which this conversation was Jesus. Conversation here is essentially another word for communion: “God is no more than what the Father, Son and Spirit give to and receive from each other in the inseparable communion that is the outcome of their love. Communion is the meaning of the word: there is no ‘being’ of God other than this dynamic of persons in relation”.

Stephen Verney called this the ‘Dance of Love’, the interplay between the Father, the Spirit and Jesus into which we are invited to enter: “”I can do nothing”, [Jesus] said, “except what I see the Father doing”. If he lays aside his teaching robes and washes the feet of the learners … it is because he sees his Father doing it. God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, is like that; he too lays aside his dignity and status as a teacher. He does not try to force his objective truth into our thick heads, but he gives himself to us in acts of humble service; he laughs with us and weeps with us, and he invites us to know him in our hearts through an interaction and an interplay between us. It is this knowledge that Jesus has received from the Father, and in the to and fro of this relationship he and the Father are one. They need each other. That is the pattern of how things potentially are in the universe, and of how God means them to be”.

In saying that we are called to enter in to this interplay within and between the Trinity, Verney is saying that we are called to join the conversation between Father, Son and Spirit. It is this that we see happening in John’s Gospel as Nathanael, Mary, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, the crowds of Jews and their leaders, the disciples, Mary and Martha, and Pilate among others are all drawn into the conversation within the Godhead.

God wants us to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate, with him so that we can find him for ourselves, find ourselves in him, and embody his characteristics and interests in ourselves. The philosopher, Martin Buber, has argued that “God is not met by turning away from the world or by making God into an object of contemplation, a “being” whose existence can be proved and whose attributes can be demonstrated.” Instead, we can know God only in dialogue with him and this dialogue goes on moment by moment in each new situation as we respond with our whole being to the unforeseen and the unique.

Our dialogue with God interrogates the very nature of what we are, and how we understand our identity, as it is from the art of conversation that truth emerges and our identity is constructed. It is through this conversation that the Father loves us, showing us all that he is doing. Truth emerging and identity constructed are the greater works which he shows to us through this conversation and which astonish us. Amen.

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The Innocence Mission - Every Hour Here.

Conversations that enlarge our world

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Catherine's Wickford and St Mary’s Runwell this morning:

The two stories that we have heard read this morning (1 Samuel 3: 1-10 & John 1: 43-end) are linked by the idea that conversations can surprise us and enlarge our understanding of life.

Samuel is surprised by the voice that he hears in the night. At first, he can only think of it in terms of his known frame of reference and therefore he thinks that the voice he is hearing must be that of Eli, the Temple Priest, although Eli assures him that this is not the case. After hearing the voice three times his world is enlarged by the understanding that God can and wants to speak to him. What a revelation! His whole world is changed in a moment and the direction of his life shifts in that moment. He goes on to listen to and talk with God throughout his life and becomes one of the greatest leaders in Israel as a result.

In our gospel reading, Nathanael has a conversation with Jesus which begins with Nathanael closing down possibilities – “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” – but ends with him acknowledging Jesus as the Son of God and King of Israel. What a transformation brought about through a brief conversation.

Just think for a moment about what happens when we are in conversation with other people. First, we have to become aware of someone other than ourselves. Jonathan Sacks says, “we must learn to listen and be prepared to be surprised by others … make ourselves open to their stories, which may profoundly conflict with ours … we must learn the art of conversation, from which truth emerges … by the … process of letting our world be enlarged by the presence of others who think, act, and interpret reality in ways radically different from our own.”

Second, by these conversations we become aware of ourselves. As people, we are not autonomous constructions. Instead, our individual identities are gifted to us by the people, events, stories and histories that we encounter as we go through life. If there was no one and nothing outside of ourselves we would have no reference points in life, no way of knowing what is unique and special about ourselves. In conversations we become aware of how we differ from others and therefore what is unique about ourselves.

Finally, in conversations we also become aware of what we have in common with others. Conversation is something that you can only do with someone else. Therefore, Charles Taylor has argued that, opening a conversation is to inaugurate a common action. A conversation is ‘our’ action, something we are both involved in together. In this way, conversation reminds us of those things that “we can only value or enjoy together” and is, as Rowan Williams has said, “an acknowledgement that someone else’s welfare is actually constitutive of my own.”

Conversation with others can enlarge our understanding of reality, help us come to know ourselves better and make us aware of all that we share with others. It is perhaps because of these possibilities that the Bible is full of conversations and that God appears to want to draw us into conversation with himself. The philosopher, Martin Buber, has argued that “God is not met by turning away from the world or by making God into an object of contemplation, a “being” whose existence can be proved and whose attributes can be demonstrated.” Instead, I know God only in dialogue with him and this dialogue goes on moment by moment in each new situation as I respond with my whole being to the unforeseen and the unique.

This way of thinking about life as a constant conversation with God, I think, makes sense of Paul’s statement that we should pray without ceasing. If we talk to God about all that we encounter and feel in our daily lives and if we constantly look to hear from and encounter God in the ordinary, everyday things, people and situations around us, then we will be in a constant conversation with God. Life itself will be a conversation and that enlargement of understanding, increased self-knowledge and awareness of what we share with others will become our reality.

These are particularly valuable reflections for us near the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Some measure of unity will only come within the Church as we engage in and remain in conversation with each other. Often the issues that divide us seem to push us towards the breaking off of conversation but, if we are serious, about the unity of the Body of Christ and about the importance that the Bible places on conversation then ending conversations should be the last thing that we consider.

So, as the week of prayer for Christian Unity approaches, let us enter into prayer as a lifelong constant conversation with God and let us enter into conversation with others as a means of affirming what we share despite our differences. Then we will know our world being enlarged in the way that was the case for both Samuel and Nathanael. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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Gerry Rafferty - Who Cares.

Invited in to the Dance of Love

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Andrew's Wickford this morning:

Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished.” (John 5. 17-30)

“God wants to communicate with humanity, and … Jesus represents the essence of that desire to talk,” says Mike Riddell. As God’s Son, Jesus was in a constant conversation with both God the Father and with God the Spirit. In these verses and others, the Son claims that he hears from the Father and speaks just what the Father has taught him (John 8: 26 – 29). He also claims that his relationship with the Father is not just one way, rather the Father also always hears the Son (John 11: 41 & 42). Similarly, he says that the Spirit will not speak on his own but only what he hears (John 16: 13). The Spirit is sent, like the Son, by the Father, but comes in the name of the Son to remind the disciples of everything that the Son said to them (John 14: 26 & 27). This interplay or dialogue within the Godhead between Father, Son and Spirit can be summed up in the words of John 3. 34-35: “For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God; to him God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.”

Stephen Verney calls this interplay between Father, Son and Spirit, which he believes we are called to enter, ‘the Dance of Love.’ He writes: “”I can do nothing”, [Jesus] said, “except what I see the Father doing”. If he lays aside his teaching robes and washes the feet of the learners … it is because he sees his Father doing it. God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, is like that; he too lays aside his dignity and status as a teacher. He does not try to force his objective truth into our thick heads, but he gives himself to us in acts of humble service; he laughs with us and weeps with us, and he invites us to know him in our hearts through an interaction and an interplay between us. It is this knowledge that Jesus has received from the Father, and in the to and fro of this relationship he and the Father are one. They need each other. That is the pattern of how things potentially are in the universe, and of how God means them to be”.

The beginning of John’s Gospel can be read as saying that this kind of conversation, dialogue and partnership with God is actually what life is all about: “It all arose out of a conversation, conversation within God, in fact the conversation was God. So God started the discussion, and everything came out of this, and nothing happened without consultation.

This was the life, life that was the light of human beings, shining in the darkness, a darkness which neither understood nor quenched its creativity …

The subject of the conversation, the original light, came into the world, the world that had arisen out of his willingness to converse. He fleshed out the words but the world did not understand. He came to those who knew the language, but they did not respond. Those who did became a new creation (his children). They read the signs and responded.

These children were born out of sharing in the creative activity of God. They heard the conversation still going on, here, now, and took part, discovering a new way of being people.

To be invited to share in a conversation about the nature of life was for them, a glorious opportunity not to be missed.” (John 1: 1-14 revisited)

God wants us to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate, with him so that we can find him for ourselves, find ourselves in him, and embody his characteristics and interests in ourselves. The philosopher, Martin Buber, has argued that “God is not met by turning away from the world or by making God into an object of contemplation, a “being” whose existence can be proved and whose attributes can be demonstrated.” Instead, we can know God only in dialogue with him and this dialogue goes on moment by moment in each new situation as we respond with our whole being to the unforeseen and the unique.

Our dialogue with God interrogates the very nature of what we are, and how we understand our identity, as it is from the art of conversation that truth emerges and our identity is constructed. It is through this conversation that the Father loves us, showing us all that he is doing. Truth emerging and identity constructed are the greater works which he shows to us through this conversation and which astonish us.

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U2 - Invisible.

The conversation was God

Here's the reflection I shared during today's Choral Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished.” (John 5. 17-30)

“God wants to communicate with humanity, and … Jesus represents the essence of that desire to talk,” says Mike Riddell. As God’s Son, Jesus was in a constant conversation with both God the Father and with God the Spirit. In these verses and others, the Son claims that he hears from the Father and speaks just what the Father has taught him (John 8: 26 – 29). He also claims that his relationship with the Father is not just one way, rather the Father also always hears the Son (John 11: 41 & 42).

Similarly, he says that the Spirit will not speak on his own but only what he hears (John 16: 13). The Spirit is sent, like the Son, by the Father, but comes in the name of the Son to remind the disciples of everything that the Son said to them (John 14: 26 & 27). This interplay or dialogue within the Godhead between Father, Son and Spirit can be summed up in the words of John 3. 34-35: “For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God; to him God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.”

Stephen Verney calls this interplay between Father, Son and Spirit, which he believes we are called to enter, ‘the Dance of Love.’ He writes: ‘“I can do nothing”, [Jesus] said, “except what I see the Father doing”. If he lays aside his teaching robes and washes the feet of the learners … it is because he sees his Father doing it. God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, is like that; he too lays aside his dignity and status as a teacher. He does not try to force his objective truth into our thick heads, but he gives himself to us in acts of humble service; he laughs with us and weeps with us, and he invites us to know him in our hearts through an interaction and an interplay between us. It is this knowledge that Jesus has received from the Father, and in the to and fro of this relationship he and the Father are one. They need each other. That is the pattern of how things potentially are in the universe, and of how God means them to be.’

The beginning of John’s Gospel can be read as saying that this kind of conversation, dialogue and partnership with God is actually what life is all about: “It all arose out of a conversation, conversation within God, in fact the conversation was God. So God started the discussion, and everything came out of this, and nothing happened without consultation.

This was the life, life that was the light of human beings, shining in the darkness, a darkness which neither understood nor quenched its creativity …

The subject of the conversation, the original light, came into the world, the world that had arisen out of his willingness to converse. He fleshed out the words but the world did not understand. He came to those who knew the language, but they did not respond. Those who did became a new creation (his children). They read the signs and responded.

These children were born out of sharing in the creative activity of God. They heard the conversation still going on, here, now, and took part, discovering a new way of being people.

To be invited to share in a conversation about the nature of life was for them, a glorious opportunity not to be missed.” (John 1: 1-14 revisited)

God wants us to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate, with him so that we can find him for ourselves, find ourselves in him, and embody his characteristics and interests in ourselves. The philosopher, Martin Buber, has argued that “God is not met by turning away from the world or by making God into an object of contemplation, a “being” whose existence can be proved and whose attributes can be demonstrated.” Instead, we can know God only in dialogue with him and this dialogue goes on moment by moment in each new situation as we respond with our whole being to the unforeseen and the unique.

Our dialogue with God interrogates the very nature of what we are, and how we understand our identity, as it is from the art of conversation that truth emerges and our identity is constructed. It is through this conversation that the Father loves us, showing us all that he is doing. Truth emerging and identity constructed are the greater works which he shows to us through this conversation and which astonish us.

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Johannes Brahms - Missa Canonica.

The Affirmative and the Negative Ways

Here's the reflection that I shared during Sacred Space at St Martin-in-the-Fields this evening:

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.’

A man visits the desert fathers and experiences two approaches to spirituality. One involves abstinence, particularly from speech through 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. They are also the two different paths found in Psalm 23 – the path through green pastures and beside still waters and the path through the valley of the shadow of death.

In one we find God in the world around of us - the people, places, creatures and creations including the green pastures and still waters. 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 – a spread table, a full cup, goodness and mercy. It’s also the way 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 which can involve travelling through the valley of the shadow of death. 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 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.’ 

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.’

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. 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’ 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.'

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?’

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?

While you are pondering those questions I close with two poems exploring first the Negative Way, second, the Affirmative.

are/are not

We hear you
and
do not.
We are with you
and
are not.
Through whom,
with whom
and in whom,
we are – what?

We are one
with what
we are
not.

No voice is audible,
yet we hear.
No hand touches ours,
yet we feel.
No eye has seen the glory,
yet we kneel.
What you are,
who you are
is and
is not
clear.

Knowing
and
not knowing.
In
and out
of touch.
Out of mind
yet
mindful.
Out of sight
yet
insight.

We are
in relation
to much
that is excess –
beyond
comprehension
and expectation –
being
night
and
light.

Attend, attend

Attend, attend, pay attention, contemplate.
Open eyes of faith to days, minutes,
moments of miracle and marvel; there is wildness
and wonder wherever you go, present
in moments that never repeat, running free,
never coming again. Savour, savour the present –
small things, dull moments, dry prayers –
sacraments of presence, sense of wonder,
daily divine depth in the here and now.
There’s only here, there’s only now,
these are the days, this is the fiery vision,
awe and wildness, miracle and flame. Take off
your shoes, stand in the holy fire; sacrament
of the burning, always consumed, never repeating
present moment, knowing the time is now.   

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Taize - Within Our Darkest Night.

Seeing is Receiving: The art of contemplation (9)

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.

Entering the interplay within the Godhead

Here is my reflection from today's Choral Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished.” (John 5. 17-30)

“God wants to communicate with humanity, and … Jesus represents the essence of that desire to talk,” says Mike Riddell. As God’s Son, Jesus was in a constant conversation with both God the Father and with God the Spirit. In these verses and others, the Son claims that he hears from the Father and speaks just what the Father has taught him (John 8: 26 – 29). He also claims that his relationship with the Father is not just one way, rather the Father also always hears the Son (John 11: 41 & 42). Similarly, he says that the Spirit will not speak on his own but only what he hears (John 16: 13). The Spirit is sent, like the Son, by the Father, but comes in the name of the Son to remind the disciples of everything that the Son said to them (John 14: 26 & 27). This interplay or dialogue within the Godhead between Father, Son and Spirit can be summed up in the words of John 3. 34-35: “For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God; to him God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.”

Stephen Verney calls this interplay between Father, Son and Spirit, which he believes we are called to enter, ‘the Dance of Love.’ He writes: “”I can do nothing”, [Jesus] said, “except what I see the Father doing”. If he lays aside his teaching robes and washes the feet of the learners … it is because he sees his Father doing it. God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, is like that; he too lays aside his dignity and status as a teacher. He does not try to force his objective truth into our thick heads, but he gives himself to us in acts of humble service; he laughs with us and weeps with us, and he invites us to know him in our hearts through an interaction and an interplay between us. It is this knowledge that Jesus has received from the Father, and in the to and fro of this relationship he and the Father are one. They need each other. That is the pattern of how things potentially are in the universe, and of how God means them to be”.

The beginning of John’s Gospel can be read as saying that this kind of conversation, dialogue and partnership with God is actually what life is all about: “It all arose out of a conversation, conversation within God, in fact the conversation was God. So God started the discussion, and everything came out of this, and nothing happened without consultation.

This was the life, life that was the light of human beings, shining in the darkness, a darkness which neither understood nor quenched its creativity …

The subject of the conversation, the original light, came into the world, the world that had arisen out of his willingness to converse. He fleshed out the words but the world did not understand. He came to those who knew the language, but they did not respond. Those who did became a new creation (his children). They read the signs and responded.

These children were born out of sharing in the creative activity of God. They heard the conversation still going on, here, now, and took part, discovering a new way of being people.

To be invited to share in a conversation about the nature of life was for them, a glorious opportunity not to be missed.” (John 1: 1-14 revisited)

God wants us to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate, with him so that we can find him for ourselves, find ourselves in him, and embody his characteristics and interests in ourselves. The philosopher, Martin Buber, has argued that “God is not met by turning away from the world or by making God into an object of contemplation, a “being” whose existence can be proved and whose attributes can be demonstrated.” Instead, we can know God only in dialogue with him and this dialogue goes on moment by moment in each new situation as we respond with our whole being to the unforeseen and the unique.

Our dialogue with God interrogates the very nature of what we are, and how we understand our identity, as it is from the art of conversation that truth emerges and our identity is constructed. It is through this conversation that the Father loves us, showing us all that he is doing. Truth emerging and identity constructed are the greater works which he shows to us through this conversation and which astonish us.

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Gungor - You Have Me.

Silence & Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert

The 4th and 5th century Desert Fathers and Mothers offer a message of profound simplicity and depth. At St Martin-in-the-Fields we are journeying together into their desert of wisdom this Lent to rediscover some of the most vital truths about our lives and faith.

Each Wednesday in Lent there is the invitation to join us for our Bread for the World informal Eucharist where we take the wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers as the theme for reflection. This is followed by a simple Lenten supper before we divide into groups to share thoughts and our own responses to this desert wisdom.

We are using former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' book Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert as our guide. With him we are exploring the extraordinary wisdom that comes with this desert spirituality, much of which resonates so strongly with aspects of our own modern spiritual search.

• How can we discover the truth about ourselves?
• How can we live in relationship with others?
• What does the desert say about recognising our priorities?
• How do we learn to pray?
• How can we create a fearless community?

Yesterday, I led our reflections with the following thoughts:

“… 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.”

So we come to the story which gives this book its title. 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 talk 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.

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 the thinking 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.

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.”

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 one of the creation stories in Genesis; that of Adam naming the animals. Names in ancient culture were symbols of the essence of the thing named; so, Adam looks at each creature before him sees its essence and names that characteristic. As he does so, he is himself looking for a helpmate. When he has named all the animals he has still not found his helpmate. The animals are too different to him to fulfil that role but, having encountered difference, he is then immediately able to recognise his similarity to Eve and realise that they are 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.” Jean Vanier, creator of the L’Arche communities, also speaks about dependency being at the heart of community and our belonging to one another. “We do not discover who we are, we do not reach true humanness,” he says, “in a solitary state; we discover it through mutual dependency, in weakness, in learning through belonging.” Similarly, St Anthony the Great said ‘Our life and our death is with our neighbour’ 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.”

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?’”

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?

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Morten Lauridsen - O Magnum Mysterium.

Incarnation

The length of the journey become part of the gift,
beauty lying in discovery.
The privileges of deity exchanged
to take the status of a slave;
coming from heaven as helpless babe,
equality left with God.
Artist as self-portrait, creator as creation;
I and Thou, God and man
dying each other’s life,
living each other’s death,
descending into danger, depression,
despair, dismay, distress,
hopelessness, loneliness, homelessness.
Gift, come down to share our plight,
lift us into your love and light.

Flesh knowing what spirit knows.
Forgiveness in flesh,
the loss of life for the saving of life -
others he saved, himself he could not save -
life given that we might live, exchange.
I live as Christ lives in me,
his nature received as he took mine,
the burden of oppressive evil borne in God.
Burdens become light
in the exchange of burdens,
trespasses forgiven as we forgive.
The wealth of self
as the health of self exchanged.
Not Thou, yet Thou;
I and Thou exchanged, changed.
The length of the journey become part of the gift,
beauty lying in discovery.

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Mavis Staples - You Are Not Alone.

Murphy, McCahon and Buber

"Idris Murphy’s extensive career as a painter has been widely lauded. Since 1988, Murphy has been Lecturer at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts, Sydney, and in 1994 received his Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong. Acknowledged as one of the most influential landscape painters in Australian contemporary art, his work is held in the public collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, Canberra and the Art Gallery of NSW. In 2009, following a New Zealand tour, a survey exhibition of Murphy’s work—I-Thou—was held at King Street Gallery on William and at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Sydney."

Murphy said that "the things that enticed me originally to go to New Zealand: Colin McCahon, to see the land and to see what he has made of it, and from it, first hand. To somehow use it as a contrast to the desert country that I am most at home with."

John McDonald wrote: "This intense identification with the landscape can be felt everywhere in this survey. It is a relationship that comes naturally to Aboriginal artist but requires strenuous efforts on behalf of Westerners, who have to break with the pictorial habits of a lifetime. Whereas most non-indigenous artists tend to objectify the landscape, Murphy tries to fuse his own subjectivity with the mood and spirit of a place. The results are far from realistic but they are powerful and persuasive. This quest entails a leap of faith on behalf of the artist, a willingness to believe in a greater truth that lies beyond the veil of appearances. In trying to discern the atmosphere conjured up by these paintings, one might use the word “spiritual” with confidence and “mystical” with only slight embarrassment."

Murphy "titled the show I and Thou, after the small but influential book by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. It is a basic existentialist idea, that one only becomes “I” through understanding one’s existence in relation to an “Other”; but Buber extends this to the relationship between a human being and God, and even to his own relationship with a tree. It is the tree idea for which Murphy has a special affection. In the catalogue he quotes Buber’s words: “In considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is no longer It.”

Murphy writes: "When looking back and considering the 'influences' on my work, several artists and writers come to mind; these may be more or less influential at any given time. There are though, certain connections that hold and seem to be continuing. Martin Buber has been one of these connections; often encountered in quotes by other writers. Buber's articulation of how we respond to the world has been seminal to my way of seeing and therefore how I 'see' my paintings. The Martin Buber connection (exemplified by McMahon's Painting I-Thou) added to my interest in the work of Colin McMahon; in particular the way in which he depicted land ... As the difference between the truth of a painting and the truth about a painting are significant. Buber's writings have for me been a way of continuing my assessment of western paradigms in painting and have added to my encounter with indigenous art."

I and Thou "is one of McCahon’s earliest ‘word’ paintings, in which words are presented as the main imagery. The words have a physical presence, appearing as three dimensional, solid forms in space, while still maintaining their linguistic function. The fracturing of the picture surface and the spatial ambiguities of the image clearly indicates the artist’s familiarity with Cubist notions of constructing space. The presentation of the words also resembles the handiwork of signwriters, whose craft had interested McCahon since youth."


"In the first ‘word paintings’ by McCahon each image is constructed in a manner best described as ‘architectural’. To compose the paintings I Am ... and I and Thou ... McCahon has rendered each phrase in block letters, achieving pictorial illusion through the restriction of colour and the placement of the words on (or in) an ambiguous background. Dating from February 1954, both images are notable for their strong vertical, linear structure.

The source for each title is clear. ‘I and Thou’ is the title of a book by the theologian Martin Buber. ‘I am’, which McCahon re-employs in several guises in later works, is drawn from Exodus 3:4–6:

‘Then Moses said to God, “if I go to the Israelites and tell them that the God of their forefathers has sent me to them, and they ask me his name, what shall I say?” God answered “I AM that is who I am. Tell them I AM has sent you to them.”’

Of course in McCahon’s painting of this name, an ambiguity is present. For while the ‘I’ in ‘I AM’ is the God of the Old Testament, it is also possible to read it as a statement of affirmation by McCahon, who with these words reasserts himself as an artist.

In respect of the work I and Thou 1954, critic Francis Pound has a further suggestion – that the ‘I’ is floating around in Cubist space because everything is still unclear: a New Zealand culture has not yet been formed. The ‘I’ moves around in time and space.!"


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I And Thou - Go or Go Ahead.

Exiles, Migrations and Orientalism

The exhibition Exiles, reminiscences and new worlds currently being held at the Chagall, Léger and Picasso museums in the south of France is based on the following premise: "The twentieth century has seen increasing numbers of people living in exile, in a world in which the movement of people has accelerated at a fast pace, not only in line with trends, but also because of tragic episodes of poverty, wars and totalitarianism. Whether or not it was their choice to leave their country, these artists, although uprooted, did not give up their creative work. Indeed, in many cases their work bears the hallmark of a former world charged with meaning and feelings, unforgettable. For these artists, the return to the past - embarked upon from a sense of loss and in a mood of reminiscence - was in fact a necessary transition in the way forward to new experiences in form."

Similarly, Migrations: Journeys into British Art explored British art through the theme of migration from 1500 to the present day, reflecting the remit of Tate Britain Collection displays. Over 500 years, developments in transport, new artistic institutions, politics and economics have all contributed to artists choosing to settle temporarily or permanently in Britain. From the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch landscape and still-life painters who came to Britain in search of new patrons, through moments of political and religious unrest, to Britain’s current position within the global landscape, the exhibition revealed how British art has been fundamentally shaped by successive waves of migration, raising questions about the formation of a national collection of British art against a continually shifting demographic.

Within this, in the early 20th century different definitions of Jewish art were explored through two influential exhibitions. The first emphasised Jewish artists’ contributions to mainstream British art and the second showed a distinctive identity for Jewish art by aligning it with modernism and the avant-garde. Then in the 1930s and 1940s European artists fled to Britain to escape political unrest and persecution on the continent, strengthening existing links with avant-garde British groups and bringing with them modernist principles of art and design. Here they discovered new materials and responded to different visual traditions as well as to the conditions of exile. Important figures who marked the course of British Art included Piet Mondrian, Naum Gabo and Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, who sought refuge in Britain whilst escaping political unrest and war in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
Exile was a founding experience for Chagall and Picasso, who set off for the fascinating city of Paris in the early 20th century and it spurred Léger to new heights in the United States after the Second World War. The Exiles exhibition centres on these three figures, aiming to show how exile inspired many artists, particularly in the first part of the 20th century. Their migration, voluntary or forced but never indifferent, transformed their vision and profoundly altered their art. The exhibition shows how their works were affected by the abandonment of their homeland and their investment in a new country.

The musée Chagall presents some of Chagall’s reminiscent works, which hark back to his origins, alongside artists whose experience of exile was not unlike his own: Brancusi, Brauner, Kandinsky, Masson, Miró, Hantaï or Picasso. The musée Léger centres on Léger as a builder of new worlds, overcoming the past to look into the future, accompanied by artists with a similar frame of mind: Arp, Magnelli, Mondrian, Freundlich, Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Albers and Schwitters. Exile was initially a founding experience for Chagall as he set off for Paris in the early 20th century before returning to Russia to marry. Following the Russian Revolution exile became a more permanent experience as he felt forced to leave once again returning initially to Paris but then being exiled to the US as a result of World War II before making his home finally in the South of France.

The exhibition argues that these are artists whose experience of exile, like that of Chagall, remained linked to a tireless search for the past. Yet the works shown do not always seem to bear out that contention as, in composition - primarily the then contemporary styles of abstraction (Kandinsky, Léger, Hantaï etc.) and surrealism (Brauner, Ernst, Lam etc.) - and content, they seem primarily focused on their present. So, Andre Masson’s La Resistance was a contemporary encouragement from exile to those participating in the Resistance while Wols and Jean Hélion focused on close-up’s of contemporary everyday objects and Brauner wrote of letting yourself ‘go forward towards a contemplation of the unknown experience’ because there ‘you find the keys to your eternal doubting.’

Generally, those artists featured here seem to have found that their style of creating fitted their experience of exile and often, as in the Artists in Exile show organised by Pierre Matisse in New York in 1942 (of which Chagall was a part) being feted for doing so. Only in more straitened circumstances, such as Kurt Schwitters painting landscapes of the Lake District for economic reasons during exile in the UK, do we see, in this exhibition, artists changing styles as a result of exile.

An exhibition on a related theme - The Jews in Orientalism - recently ended at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in Paris. Where Migrations explored the impact of exiles on national art and Exiles the impact of migration on artist's themselves, The Jews in Orientalism explored the world of Orientalist painting, focussing on the representation of the Jew as “Oriental” in art from 1832 to 1929, in other words perceptions of a migrant group from those who view themselves as other than the group themselves.
Orientalism, the study of the East and its various cultures, is a conflicted discipline where arguments rage about the cultural agendas underpinning the various approaches used in its study. Accusations of Eurocentrism and colonialism, differences between the familiar and the strange, and the extent to which Islam and Judaism are under discussion are just some of the areas of debate. For some, Orientalism is based on the Christian West's attempts to understand and manage its relations with both of its monotheistic Others - Muslims and Jews.

The Jews in Orientalism was not therefore simply an exhibition exploring the world of Orientalist painting from 1832 to 1929 but also a contribution by its curators to these debates through their focus on the representation of the Jew as “Oriental.” Historically, the exhibition demonstrates the extent to which Jews have almost always been present whenever occidentals talked about or imagined the East.

Artists like Eugène Delacroix in Morocco and Théodore Chassériau in Algeria filled their notebooks with sketches of Jewish figures, using them later in large pictures such as Delacroix’s pioneering Jewish Wedding in Morocco (1841). As a Romantic artist fascinated with the exotic, Delacroix was restless for adventure and was excited by the opportunity which opened to him when he was asked by Ambassador Charles de Mornay to join a goodwill mission to Morocco's Sultan Moulay Abd al-Rahman. Delacroix filled seven notebooks with drawings, watercolours and notes on the people, architecture and accoutrements of Moroccan life in order to ensure that details of costume and demeanour were as accurate as could be.

This sense of ‘truth to nature’ motivated many of the artists who travelled to the Orient, in part because their involvement in such journeys was often, as with Delacroix, in the role of official artist documenting such missions. For William Holman Hunt though ‘truth to nature’ was already a key element of the symbolic hyper-realism that was Pre-Raphaelitism.

In order to ensure that he represented “all objects exactly as they would appear in nature” (Ruskin), Hunt travelled to the Holy Land where he developed what he acknowledged to be an “Oriental mania” that resulted in paintings such as The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (from his first trip in 1854-5). The Manchester Guardian marvelled at Hunt’s scholarship and skill: ‘No picture of such extraordinary elaboration has been seen in our day… Draperies, architecture, heads and hands, are wrought to a point of complete imitative finish… this picture is replete with meaning, from the foreground to the remotest distance.” For a later engraving of the picture Hunt produced an explanation of 29 symbolic details in the image.

However, in doing so, Hunt, like others at the time, believed that the contemporary Orient would reveal what the Orient had always been and, as a result, it can be argued that in much Oriental Christian art, most Israelites are actually depicted as though they were Muslims. The reverse occurred in the work of Maurycy Gottlieb whose Christ before His Judges (1877–1879) is included here and who created two significant canvases where Jesus' shroud is a Jewish prayer shawl, the talith. In Gottlieb’s work we see then, for the first time, a genuinely Jewish Jesus.  

At the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem artists strove “to create a synthesis between European artistic traditions and the Jewish design traditions of the East and West, and to integrate it with the local culture of the Land of Israel.” Artists such as Abel Pann, Ephraim Moses Lilien and Zeev Raban created a style of Oriental arabesques, Jugendstil flowing lines and decorative flatness that, as Haim Finkelstein and Haim Maor have noted, combined biblical motifs, often in a Zionist perspective, and landscapes done in an idealist-utopian and Orientalist spirit.

It is arguable, however, that this synthesis was more independently and powerfully achieved by Lesser Ury. Martin Buber considered that Ury lived “the old sacred flame of the Orient, the hot breath, which washes over the rough earth, the gigantic figures of elemental creatures before the grand background of an immeasurable expanse.” In a letter Buber sent to Ury, he described his vision of a Jewish artist. "… who independently of outside formulas and commandments found his way through the wilderness, who has nothing in common with schools and cliques and who is led only by the laws of his own being, who was hard as metal to all external solutions, and whose art was soft and flexible as wax under the hand of the angel. Only from such an artist…can we learn that the Jewish spirit, the old turmoil over pictures is reborn to a second youth and incorporated in paintings."

Ury’s images of Jeremiah, Moses and Jewish exiles included in this exhibition amply bear out the contention that, in this letter, Buber was actually describing his appreciation of Ury and his work. By ending with the Bezalel Academy and Ury, more than simply demonstrating the extent to which Jews have almost always been present whenever occidentals imagined the East, the exhibition also reveals the ability of Jewish artists to re-embrace an oriental Jewish identity by establishing a continuity between Biblical Antiquity and the contemporary Middle East.

Fresh light is also cast on the biblical paintings of artists such as Moreau, Vernet, Tissot and Holman Hunt through this exhibition. While this focus supports the argument made by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar that one benefit of studying the Jews as a topic in orientalism involves discovery of the extent to which orientalism has been not only a modern Western or imperialist discourse but also a Christian one, it is also possible that, in doing so, the exhibition does not adequately address the extent to which orientalism has been, in the view of Edward Said, a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).

Chagall’s work can also be understood as exploring Jewish identity by establishing a continuity between Biblical Antiquity and his contemporary experience of exile as, through his Message Biblique and other similar paintings, he engages with his Jewish heritage from the Exodus through the Pogroms to the Holocaust. Thereby, linking past and present together in experience and understanding. In Chagall’s work exodus and exile are the normal state of the Jewish people and the source of their joys, sorrows, inspirations and insights.

Surprisingly, his key symbol of faith in exile is that of the crucified Christ who featuring centrally or tangentially in numerous of the works shown here. Always visually and accurately a Jewish Christ, nevertheless Chagall uses this image in ways that have real synergy with Christian theology. In ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’, for example, the crucified Christ appears above Isaac as the future sacrificial son. Christ becomes the embodiment in Chagall’s work of Israel as the suffering servant; an understanding which culminates in the ‘Exodus’ of 1952 - 1966 where the crucified Christ embraces both the Jews of the Exodus and of the Holocaust.

In these paintings past and present cohere allowing an experience of exile, where personal sorrow is set within a narrative of ongoing faith, to be experienced and felt, revealing exile as pilgrimage.

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Young Disciples - Get Yourself Together.

The art of conversation

I have on more than one occasion recently (see here and here) argued that inter-faith dialogue provides an opportunity for the development of a broader understanding of interaction with those who are different from my or ourselves; that it can both provide a basis for a new approach to morality and give an insight into the nature of the Trinity.

The necessity for such understandings have been reinforced for me by the reaction to decisions made recently by the deputies and bishops of The Episcopal Church and the posts regarding CMS and Greenbelt. What passes for debate on such issues is often anything but, primarily because there is no real desire to understand, respect or value the other. So, in the CMS/Greenbelt furore, for example, those who understand themselves to be abused by their opponents as "bigoted, blinkered, homophobic, narrow-minded" etc. respond in the exactly the same vein by posting about gay bishop poster boys with a "sadly amaturish biblical hermeneutic" and equating gay christian organisations with the BNP.

Such positions are taken and abuse meted out because people have already made up their minds on these issues before hearing any argument from their opponents and, therefore, they believe that they have nothing to learn from their opponents. This is the reverse of what has to occur when real and meaningful inter-faith dialogue takes place, as can be seen, for example, in the ten ethical guidelines drawn up by the Christian Muslim Forum which set out how Christians and Muslims can talk about their faith to each other in a way that is just, truthful and compassionate:
1) We bear witness to, and proclaim our faith not only through words but through our
attitudes, actions and lifestyles.
2) We cannot convert people, only God can do that. In our language and methods we
should recognise that people’s choice of faith is primarily a matter between themselves and
God.
3) Sharing our faith should never be coercive; this is especially important when working with
children, young people and vulnerable adults. Everyone should have the choice to accept or
reject the message we proclaim and we will accept people’s choices without resentment.
4) Whilst we might care for people in need or who are facing personal crises, we should
never manipulate these situations in order to gain a convert.
5) An invitation to convert should never be linked with financial, material or other
inducements. It should be a decision of the heart and mind alone.
6) We will speak of our faith without demeaning or ridiculing the faiths of others.
7) We will speak clearly and honestly about our faith, even when that is uncomfortable or
controversial.
8) We will be honest about our motivations for activities and we will inform people when
events will include the sharing of faith.
9) Whilst recognising that either community will naturally rejoice with and support those who
have chosen to join them, we will be sensitive to the loss that others may feel.
10) Whilst we may feel hurt when someone we know and love chooses to leave our faith, we
will respect their decision and will not force them to stay or harass them afterwards.

These are guidelines which those on both sides of the current debates in the Anglican Communion would do well to study and apply. If we could begin to debate controversial issues from a similar starting point, our debates could be much more productive.

Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, writes in The Dignity of Difference:

“We must learn the art of conversation, from which truth emerges not, as in Socratic dialogues, by the refutation of falsehood but by the quite different process of letting our world be enlarged by the presence of others who think, act, and interpret reality in ways radically different from our own.”

When we do this, when we “recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, ideals, are different from mine” then we are allowing God to remake us in his image instead of making God in our own image. And to do so has moral outworkings, as Sacks notes when he writes:

“I believe that we are being summoned by God to see in the human other a trace of the divine Other. The test – so lamentably failed by the great powers of the twentieth century – is to see the divine presence in the face of a stranger; to heed the cry of those who are disempowered in this age of unprecedented powers; who are hungry and poor and ignorant and uneducated, whose human potential is being denied the chance to be expressed. That is the faith of Abraham and Sarah, from whom the great faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, trace their spiritual or actual ancestry. That is the faith of one who, though he called himself but dust and ashes, asked of God himself, ‘Shall the judge of all the earth not do justice?’ We are not gods, but are summoned by God – to do His work of love and justice and compassion and peace.”

Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh make similar points when they write that:

“in this covenantal worldview, all of creation is subjective, all of creation speaks. The task of human knowing, in all of its forms, is to translate that creational glossolalia into human terms … An epistomology intent on listening to our covenantal partners (God and the rest of creation) will decidely not silence the voice of the other … In response to the gift of creation, we are called as stewards to a knowing that opens up the creation in all of its integrity and enhances its disclosure. Rather than engaging the real world as masters, we are invited to be image-bearing rulers. Our knowing does not create or integrate reality. Rather we respond to a created and integrated reality in a way that either honors and promotes that integration or dishonors it. We are called to reciprocate the Creator’s love in our epistomological stewardship of this gift. Wright describes such an epistomology of love beautifully when he says, “The lover affirms the reality and the otherness of the beloved. Love does not seek to collapse the beloved in terms of itself.” In a relational and stewardly epistemology, “ ‘love’ will mean ‘attention’: the readiness to let the other be the other, the willingness to grow and change in relation to the other.””

Like Middleton and Walsh, I have also written (in Living with other faiths) that there is a biblical, theological and philosophical grounding for such dialogue in the Christian tradition. I believe that this grounding begins with the exchange that is at the heart of the Trinity, takes in both the conversations between human beings and God which repeatedly occur in scripture and the dialogical form of scripture itself, and accepts the philosophical perception that human identity is constructed through conversation.

Drawing on the philosophical thought of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, Rowan Williams has written that, “all human identity is constructed through conversations, in one way or another.” First, we have to become aware of someone other than ourselves. Jonathan Sacks says, “we must learn to listen and be prepared to be surprised by others … make ourselves open to their stories, which may profoundly conflict with ours … we must learn the art of conversation, from which truth emerges … by the … process of letting our world be enlarged by the presence of others who think, act, and interpret reality in ways radically different from our own.”

Second, by these conversations we become aware of ourselves. As people, we are not autonomous constructions. Instead, our individual identities are gifted to us by the people, events, stories and histories that we encounter as we go through life. If there was no one and nothing outside of ourselves we would have no reference points in life, no way of knowing what is unique and special about ourselves. In conversations we become aware of how we differ from others and therefore what is unique about ourselves.

Finally, in conversations we also become aware of what we have in common with others. Conversation is something that you can only do with someone else. Therefore, Charles Taylor has argued that, opening a conversation is to inaugurate a common action. A conversation is ‘our’ action, something we are both involved in together. In this way, conversation reminds us of those things that “we can only value or enjoy together” and is, as Rowan Williams has said, “an acknowledgement that someone else’s welfare is actually constitutive of my own.”

Recognising the significant changes which have led to religious plurality in our society, the General Synod as long ago as 1981 endorsed the Four Principles of Inter Faith Dialogue agreed ecumenically by the British Council of Churches:

• Dialogue begins when people meet each other
• Dialogue depends upon mutual understanding and mutual trust
• Dialogue makes it possible to share in service to the community
• Dialogue becomes the medium of authentic witness

Though simple and obvious when set out like this, as are the ten ethical guidelines from the Christian Muslim Forum, they nevertheless are easily and frequently ignored when debate and dialogue is supposedly occurring. These are then guidelines and principles for the art of conversation that we urgently need to re-learn in dealing with differences within the Anglican Communion, and inter-faith dialogue can show us the way.

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The Low Anthem - This God Damn House.