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.

Love came down at Christmas

Here is my sermon from  yesterday Eucharist of Christmas at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

In my last parish we commissioned a mosaic which hung on the outside of the East wall of the church facing the street. The mosaic was simply the word ‘Love’ created in grafitti-style. It hung there for several years without a great deal of comment as part of the community garden we created until one Christmas, in high winds, it was blown down from its position on the East wall; quite literally a case of ‘Love came down at Christmas’.

Christina Rossetti’s wonderful carol, from which that phrase comes, focuses on the Christ-child as the ultimate expression of love:

‘Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, love divine;
Love was born at Christmas …

Love incarnate, love divine’

Through these words, she reminds us that God is love and that the incarnation - God become human - is as much a sign of love for us as is Christ’s crucifixion. As the Apostle John wrote, “God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven” (1 John 4. 9 & 10). That is what she means by that marvellous phrase “Love came down at Christmas.” The incarnation is at the heart of Christianity because it is a sign of the love that God has for us. God loves us so much that he is prepared to become one of us, even though this means huge constraints and ultimately leads to his death.

On Christmas Day last year Peter Wehner, an opinion writer for the New York Times, argued in a piece for that paper that: 'Because the Christmas story has been told so often for so long, it’s easy even for Christians to forget how revolutionary Jesus’ birth was. The idea that God would become human and dwell among us, in circumstances both humble and humiliating, shattered previous assumptions.’ As a result, ‘we … do well to remind ourselves of the true meaning of the incarnation.’

So what is that true meaning and what does it mean that love came down? When I have run Quiet Days on prayer in everyday life, I have often used a prayer by David Adam which provides a simple answer to this question.

Escalator prayer

As I ascend this stair
I pray for all who are in despair

All who have been betrayed
All who are dismayed
All who are distressed
All who feel depressed
All ill and in pain
All who are driven insane
All whose hope has flown
All who are alone
All homeless on the street
All who with danger meet

Lord, who came down to share our plight
Lift them into your love and light

(David Adam, PowerLines: Celtic Prayers about Work, Triangle, 1992)

This prayer uses the imagery of descending and ascending an escalator to ask that those at the bottom of the descent will be understood and ministered to before being raised up. The prayer is based on the understanding that, through his incarnation and nativity, Christ comes into the messiness of human life, as a human being, to experience, for himself, all that we experience; the betrayals, dismay, distress, depression, illness, pain, insanity, loss of hope, loneliness, homelessness, danger and despair that many of us experience at periods in our lives and which some experience as their everyday life.

Christ comes to understand all this and to bear it on his shoulders to God, through his death on the cross, in order that, like him, we too can rise to new life and ascend to the life of God himself. “Lord, who came down to share our plight / Lift them into your love and light.” This is the hope held out to us through the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem; that he was born into poverty, exile, danger, stigma for our sake, in order to be one with us in our lives. Jesus was born to be Emmanuel – God with us. As John 1. 14 says, in the contemporary translation of the Bible called The Message: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.” This is what Rossetti meant by that marvellous phrase “Love came down at Christmas”.

Because God, through Christ’s birth, has entered our world and moved into our neighbourhood, he has identified himself with us. As we have reflected, he became a human being experiencing the whole trajectory of human existence from conception through birth, puberty, adulthood to death, including all that we experience along the way in terms of relationships, experiences, emotions and temptations. He has been made like us, his brothers and sisters, in every way, tempted in every way just as we are and able to sympathize with our weaknesses. As Hebrews 4. 16 say: “He's been through weakness and testing, experienced it all — all but the sin.”

This can be seen as the fulfilment of a promise of God recorded in Isaiah 43. 1 - 3:

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.”

That then means that, as we pass through life’s challenges, we never walk alone. As a result, we have a reason to sing, with the fans of Liverpool F.C.:

“Walk on, through the wind
Walk on, through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone.
You’ll never walk alone.”

The wonderful result of love come down at Christmas - of Christ’s nativity and incarnation – is that God is with us in all of our experiences. He is the one who leads us beside the still waters and walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death and he can do this because in Jesus he has experienced human life for himself. As a result, God understands and will be alongside us in all our experiences. God’s promise is that he will be with us as we walk the path of life and that is where true security is to be found.

As we know from our online lives: ‘... there is no substitute for being there - incarnate or, literally, in the flesh.’ No amount of words that we send ‘by post or by telephone or over social networking sites - can ever match the visceral reality of presence.’ ‘Face to phone or face to screen’ can ‘never match face to face’ (Rhidian Brook, Thought for the Day) and that is why Love came down at Christmas.

The novelist Charles Williams suggests, in ‘The Descent of the Dove,’ that the incarnation, because it is not simply about God taking on flesh but also about our humanity being taken up into God, is also the ultimate affirmative act. This is based on the understanding that nothing is lost and everything can be redeemed. All experience and all images are ultimately to be gathered in and up to God and, in this sense, the beauty found in the selfless giving of the incarnation and crucifixion really will save the world.

So, by becoming one with us through the incarnation – by being the Love which came down at Christmas - God is able to be with us through times of darkness until we come to live with him in the light forever. As David Adam prays, Lord, who came down to share our plight, lift us all into your love and light. Amen.

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Bruce Cockburn - Cry Of A Tiny Babe.

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.

Discover & explore: Beauty

“Beauty will save the world.” Fyodor Dostoevsky coined the phrase which was later borrowed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ‘to set the theme of his Nobel Lecture in 1970.’ Roger Scruton has written extensively about how aesthetics—and beauty in particular—enlarges our vision of humanity, helps us find meaning in our lives, and provides knowledge of our world’s intrinsic values. Most recently, Gregory Wolfe has used the phrase for the title of his recent book, Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age, the theme of which is the importance of an aesthetic understanding for sustaining a civilized culture.’

Yet the proverb 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' suggests that there is a problem with our understandings of beauty i.e. that our understanding of it entirely subjective. Collective ideas of beauty can be formed, yet these can also be iniquitous, as with ’size zero’ in the fashion industry and the way in which that perception of beauty pressurises people into anorexia and bulimia.

The Guide to the Guildhall Art Gallery’s collection suggests that in many respects the Victorian period has defined our contemporary notions of beauty. It notes that: ‘Victorian painters set out to capture and redefine ideals of female beauty. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848, played a central role in promoting a new canon of beauty … Founder member Dante Gabriel Rossetti coined the term ‘stunner’ to describe enchanting women he met and usually convinced to pose for his paintings. From the 1860s, he embarked on a series of ‘subjectless’ sensual depictions of women … developing a new aesthetic of beauty, exemplified by La Ghirlandata (1873). This new style anticipated the Aesthetic Movement which was characterised by a departure from storytelling and a focus on the ‘Cult of Beauty’, sometimes drawing on religious imagery to convey the power of women’s looks.’

The Bible celebrates human beauty in the Song of Solomon and the beauty of creation in Psalms such as 8 and 19, where the sense that the natural world reflects to glory or beauty of God is celebrated. Ultimately, however, a very different perception of beauty is celebrated in scripture as a result of Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion. This different perception can be found exemplified in the history of Christian Art.

‘The most ancient representations of Jesus in human form can be found in the catacombs of Rome and in the church of Dura Europos, a town on the right bank of the Euphrates. There Jesus is represented as a youthful-looking “good shepherd” … with a round face, … beardless, and with short hair … he wears the upper-class clothes of that time … like a young patrician … The fact that he is made to look handsome is sometimes said to be for apologetic reasons.’

However, under ‘the influence of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Francis of Assisi it was the earthly Jesus in his suffering who captured the attention of the devout … The late Middle Ages were dominated by … [images of] the suffering Christ … the Man of Sorrows, who in his suffering became like us … On the Isenheim altar at Colmar, Matthias Grünewald depicted, in a deeply moving and shocking manner, a hideously tormented man on a cross (finished in ca. 1516), which especially calls to mind … contemporary Latin American counterparts, where in numerous instances the tortured are pictured hanging on a cross.’ (A. Wessels, ‘Images of Jesus’, SCM Press 1990)

As part of my sabbatical art pilgrimage last year I visited churches linked to images of the crucifixion by Albert Servaes, Germaine Richier and Graham Sutherland which viewed Christ’s sacrifice as emblematic of human suffering in conflict and persecution. These were controversial as they challenged sentimental images of Christ and deliberately introduced ugliness into beautiful buildings. Servaes and Richier were both affected by decrees from the holy office which led to the removal of their artworks from the churches for which they had been commissioned. Servaes, with his Stations of the Cross and altarpiece for the Carmelite Chapel in Luithagen and Richier, with her crucifix for the church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce at Assy.

Their work, like that of Grünewald and contemporary Latin American artists, demonstrates that the centrality of an instrument of torture – the Cross – to Christianity and the perception of the suffering Christ as despised, rejected and unesteemed challenge the perceptions of beauty that we have inherited from the Victorians. In Christianity, beauty is found in the selfless love of Christ expressed most powerfully in the ugliness of crucifixion.

As a result, Christianity can find common ground with contemporary art which finds beauty in the throw-away, the ready-made, the hidden or disregarded. As just one example, American Beauty screenwriter Alan Ball uncovers heart-breaking beauty in garbage with a scene in which a plastic bag dances as it floats in the wind above a dirty sidewalk. His central character says as he views this scene that this beautiful moment made him aware of an ‘incredibly benevolent force’ behind things that wanted him to know that there is no reason to be afraid, ever.

Charles Williams suggests, in The Descent of the Dove, that the incarnation, because it is not simply about God taking on flesh but also about our humanity being taken into God, is the ultimate affirmative act. This is based on the understanding that nothing is lost and everything can be redeemed. All experience and all images are ultimately to be gathered in to God and, in this sense, the beauty found in the selfless giving of the incarnation and crucifixion really will save the world.

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The Hastings College Choir - Fairest Lord Jesus.

Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus: From occupation to liberation

Ahead of a recital, Michael Symmons Roberts explained in The Guardian at the weekend how the composition of Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus by Olivier Messiaen at the end of the second world war, and its filmic qualities, inspired his response in poetry to the work

Messiaen wrote his piano piece Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (20 Contemplations of the Infant Jesus) in 1944. It was originally a Radio Paris commission, based on some poetic tableaux by the French writer Maurice Toesca.

Symmonds Roberts writes: 'What I hadn’t realised was that Messiaen began to write the piece in Paris under German occupation in March of that year, and finished it in September after liberation. Although his commission was to write music to accompany the 12 sections of Toesca’s text, Messiaen soon abandoned that, pursuing his own poetic vision into wilder and stranger territories.

My work on the poems began to reflect aspects of this story. I was fascinated by the idea of Vingt Regards being written in a city as it crossed from occupation to liberation. Not only does the nativity story take place under Roman occupation, but “occupation” is not a bad metaphor for “annunciation”, even if it starts with a willing “yes’”. And in Christian theology, the arrival of God the creator into his own world as a helpless baby is both a huge risk and – ultimately – an act of liberation.'

Pianist Cordelia Williams is presenting ‘Between Heaven and the Clouds’, a year-long series of events setting Vingt Regards alongside words and images, including specially commissioned poetry and paintings, in order to explore these universal themes and Messiaen’s rich variety of inspiration.

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Olivier Messiaen, Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus.

T.S. Eliot: Christianity, fragmentation and reconciliation

Robert Crawford, writing in The Guardian, explains how T.S. Eliot, once a subversive outsider, became the most celebrated poet of the 20th century – a world poet, who changed the way we think:

'Fifty years ago this month (after being nursed through bouts of ill health by his shrewd second wife, Valerie, who had been his secretary and who lived until 2012), TS Eliot died in London. He was by then no longer a young bullshitter but the incarnation of his art form. He was not just the most famous poet alive, but regarded (as many still regard him) as the finest poet of the 20th century. Internationally lauded, he had been awarded the Nobel prize, the Dante Gold Medal, the Goethe prize, the US Medal of Freedom and the British Order of Merit. Adults knew him as the poet not just of “Prufrock”, but also of The Waste Land and Four Quartets; theatre audiences had flocked to his plays such as Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party at the Edinburgh festival, in London and on Broadway; at home and at school, children relished “Macavity”, one of the poems from his Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, just as eagerly as later audiences have delighted in Cats, the musical based on those poems. On 4 February 1965 Eliot’s memorial service filled Westminster Abbey.'

Crawford writes that 'Eliot remains one of the greatest religious poets in the language, and that, too, has added to his global reach as well as enriching his adopted and adapted European sensibility.'

Barbara Reynolds has described the way in which Eliot, in his essay ‘The Idea of a Christian Society’, visualised “the setting up of a Community of Christians, of clergy and laity, who shall speak with authority contesting heretical opinion and immoral legislation, individually and collectively setting themselves to form the conscience of the nation”. She has also described how Dorothy L. Sayers seized on this idea and used it as the basis of her book, Begin Here. The idea is not just representative of Sayers’ activity though, but also of Eric Gill, C.S. Lewis and Eliot himself in the books, broadcasts and lectures that they produced throughout the war years.

Eliot was linked with other writers inspired by Christianity including Christopher Fry, David Jones, Sayers and Charles Williams: Eliot published and wrote introductions to the work of Jones and Williams; Eliot, Sayers and Williams shared a common love of, and wrote on, the work of Dante; Eliot, Fry, Sayers and Williams all wrote drama for the Canterbury Festival, which was initiated by George Bell; Bell also held several conferences on art and the church and again Eliot, Sayers and Williams were involved; Eliot, Fry and Williams were part of the Verse Drama movement; while, Jones and Williams shared a love of the Arthurian legends – Jones critiquing Williams’ work in The Arthurian Torso.

Crawford comments that 'Poetry in a complex era had to reflect, or at least refract, a sense of complexity.' The complexity found in Eliot refers both to his understanding of his complex era and also to his sense of the place of tradition in the present. Eliot uses fragments of literature drawn from across tradition to map out the place of "stony rubbish" and of:

"A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water"

which is the waste land.

The Waste Land, as a poem, does not accept the waste land that it describes. The narrative movement of the poem is towards escape, the finding of the water that will renew life. Eliot's intention was to "shore up" fragments against the ruins; in other words, to the extent to which he was able, to reconstruct. His seemingly disparate fragments include the Bible, the Grail legend, the 'Golden Bough', Tarot cards, Shakespeare, Dante, Buddha's Fire Sermon and many more. All are linked, all are reconciled, in the structure and content of a poem whose narrative thread articulates a rejection of and movement away from the sterility of twentieth century life.

The same impulse can be found in the poetry and paintings of David Jones. Jones said that he regarded his poem, The Anathemata: "as a series of fragments, fragmented bits, chance scraps really, of records of things, vestiges of sorts and kinds of disciplinae, that have come my way by this channel or that influence. Pieces of stuffs that happen to mean something to me and which I see as perhaps making a kind of coat of many colours, such as belonged to 'that dreamer' in the Hebrew myth."

Jones believed that objects, images and words accrue meanings over the years that are more than the object as object or image as image. Therefore all things are signs re-presenting something else in another form. Recessive signs which re-present multiple signification are what Jones aims to create in works such as The Anathemata and 'Aphrodite in Aulis'. Jacques Maritain suggested that such multiple signification is what creates joy or delight in a work of art as “the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty”.

'Aphrodite in Aulis' is full of Jones’ preoccupations: “the Grail, the Lamb, the soldiers (Greek and Roman, Tommy and Jerry), Doric, Ionic and Corinthian architecture, the moon, the stars and the dove.” These disparate ideas and images are held together firstly by Jones’ composition with the whole painting revolving around the central figure of Aphrodite and secondly by his line which meanders over the whole composition literally linking every image. By holding these images and what they signify together in this way, Jones is able to create an image that both laments the way in which love is sacrificed by the violence and aggression of macho civilisations and also, through his crucifixion imagery, to hold out the hope that love may overcome that same violence and aggression.

Writers like Eliot and Jones chose to explore aspects of coinherence and relationality at a time when progress was achieved through specialisation and when World Wars were undermining belief in human brotherhood. Relationality, however, was fundamental to their vision enabling them to explore the links between past, present and future within works that aimed at being holistic and reconciliatory.

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Victoria Williams - Polish Those Shoes.

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.

Pacing the Cage: Bruce Cockburn

Harper Collins are to publish Pacing the Cage: A Memoir by Bruce Cockburn. Their publicity states:

 

"Since 1970, with over 30 albums and numerous awards to his credit, Bruce Cockburn has earned high praise as an exceptional songwriter and pioneering guitarist, whose career has been shaped by politics, protest, romance, and spiritual discovery. His remarkable journey has seen him embrace folk, jazz, blues, rock, and worldbeat styles while travelling to such far-flung places as Guatemala, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and Nepal, and writing memorable songs about his ever-expanding world of wonders. Having been asked to write his memoir many times over the years, now is the moment when he will open up about his Christian convictions, his personal relationships, and the social and political activism that has both invigorated and enraged his fans over the years.

Born in 1945 in Ottawa, Ontario, Bruce Cockburn began his solo career with a self-titled album in 1970. Cockburn’s ever expanding repertoire of musical styles and skillfully crafted lyrics have been covered by such

artists as Jerry Garcia, Chet Atkins, Barenaked Ladies, Jimmy Buffett, and K.D. Lang. His guitar playing, both
acoustic and electric, has placed him in the company of the world’s top instrumentalists.Cockburn remains deeply respected for his activism on issues from native rights and land mines to the environment and Third World debt, working for organizations such as Oxfam, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Friends of the Earth, and USC Canada."

Rated “rock’s last great obscurity” by Melody Maker Cockburn has quietly made a living as a singer/songwriter since 1970 and his self-titled debut while never going all out for fame and fortune. As literate a guitarist as he is a lyricist he fuses sparklingly complex jazz/rock rhythms with metaphor loaded lyricism, as often spoken as sung – “sometimes things don’t easily reduce to rhyming couplets”. Forty plus years of consistent, intelligent exploration of the personal, political and spiritual, often within the same song, is no mean achievement. When combined with both an honesty about his own relationship and faith frailties and a willingness to campaign with the likes of Oxfam raging against US and IMF oppression in the two-thirds world, you have to give the man respect.

 

Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws showcased the mysticism which, as Vox said, he seems to understand better than anyone not named Van Morrison. His Christian faith developed from an experience of God’s presence during his marriage ceremony and was given wings through the writings of C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Creation Dream opens this album and is worth quoting both as a wonderful depiction of God at his creation-work but also as a picture of what the Christian artist aims to imitate:

 

            Centred on silence, counting on nothing,

            I saw you standing on the sea.

            And everything was dark except for

            Sparks the wind struck from your hair.

            Sparks that turned to wings around you,

            Angel voices mixed with sea bird’s cries.

            Fields of motion surging outwards,

            Questions that contain their own replies.

 

            You were dancing, I saw you dancing,

            Throwing your arms towards the sky.

            Fingers opening like flares,

            Stars were shooting everywhere.

            Lines of power bursting outwards

            Along the channels of your song.

            Mercury waves flash under your feet,

            Shots of silver in the shell-pink dawn.

 

World of Wonders kicks off, by contrast, with the “you don’t really give a flying fuck about the people in misery” of IMF. Here Cockburn marries the energy of the music with the anger of the lyric, something he failed to do on the earlier Stealing Fire where he flirted with Dire Straits territory while unleashing the most un-Knopfler-like sentiments – “If I had a rocket launcher I’d make somebody pay” (Rocket Launcher). He hymned the absence of both God (Lily of the Midnight Sky) and his lover (See how I miss you) while celebrating the dawn of revolution (Santiago Dawn) and tropical partying (Down here tonight).

 

Nothing But A Burning Light was the first of two T-Bone Burnett produced albums, with Dart to the Heart being the other. Michael Been and Sam Phillips also contributed. The burning light of the album’s title is the Bible, an image taken from Blind Willie Johnson’s Soul of a Man which Cockburn covers here. Cockburn’s work is shot through by the illumination of that burning light. In a world where there are “Not many answers to be found” and where “We’re faced with mysteries profound” human love is one of the best of those mysteries (One of the Best Ones) while the very best is the redemption that “rips through the surface of time/In the cry of a tiny babe” (Cry of a Tiny Babe).

 

In 1992 in a song, Closer to the Light, written following the death of Mark Heard, Cockburn wrote the line - "There you go/Swimming deeper into mystery” – which seems to sum up the direction in which Cockburn’s work has been heading over the past forty plus years.
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Bruce Cockburn - Pacing The Cage.

CS Lewis and the Inklings

Malcolm Guite writes that:

"As part of the commemorations for CS Lewis's 'Jubilee' year the Canadian Broadcasting Company have commissioned two in depth programmes on CS Lewis and the Inklings for their Flagship 'Ideas' series. I was happy to be involved with Frank Faulk in this endeavour and did an extensive interview with him which has been used in both programmes. I was impressed by the research he has done for this programme and the range of people he has speaking on it. Two good results of that research are first that he is not content with second hand cliches about Lewis but goes out of his way to scotch falsehoods, and secondly that he gives due weight to the neglected 'other inklings' beyond Lewis and Tolkien, and particularly gives the much-neglected Owen Barfield who is allowed at last to come into hi own. Finally, Faulk has, in my view rightly, identified Imagination, and the truth of Imagination as the key to the whole 'Inklings endeavour. Here is my post on the first programme. Here us what CBC say to introduce the second program on their website:

C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams were the core of the legendary literary group The Inklings at Oxford University. They were united by a love of myth and the belief that it is through the imagination that reality is illuminated. In Part 2 of this series,  producer Frank Faulk looks at C.S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity, and his deep friendship with Tolkien, Barfield and Williams. Together Lewis and his three friends would forge a radical critique of modernity's reductionist, mechanistic and materialistic understanding of reality. It is a critique that today remains more relevant than ever.

And here is the link to both the first and second programmes:

Lewis and the Inklings Part one;

Lewis and the Inklings Part two."

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Mark Olson and the Creekdippers - Ben Jonson's Creek.

The Inklings, Fantasists or Prophets?

The first in a series of five talks which will explore how the group of writers who clustered around C. S. Lewis in the middle of the last century were forging a vision that is vital for us in the 21st Century can be found by clicking here.

The series entitled The Inklings, Fantasists or Prophets? is being given by poet, singer-songwriter, priest, chaplain, teacher and author, Malcolm Guite.

My 'There were giants in those days' series of posts may provide an interesting supplement to Malcom's lecture series and can be found by clicking here, here, here, and here.

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Annie Lennox - Into The West.