Meeting God in the dark night of the soul

Here's the sermon I shared this evening at St Catherine's Wickford:

The book of Job is the record of one man’s dark night of the soul. In the story Job loses everything that gave his life meaning. His family are wiped out, his home, money and possessions are lost, he experiences severe and painful illnesses and is left alone, except for three friends who are more hindrance than help as they offer only platitudes that essentially pin the blame for his condition on Job himself.

Job knows that the diagnosis offered by his friends is wrong. He knows there is nothing he has done to deserve his suffering. He knows that it is not punishment for something he has done and this gives us one of the reasons why this is such a significant book to find within the pages of the scriptures. The book of Job tells us that much suffering in this world is undeserved. There are times in life when we do reap what we sow and bear the consequences of our choices, as Job’s friends assume must be the case for him. But this is not one of those times and the story is told, in part, to warn us against making the assumptions made by Job’s friends. Not all suffering is brought on by our actions, sometimes life simply deals us a bum hand - and that’s the way it is!

Job is understandably angry about this situation. In the section of the poem we heard read today (Job 19:1-27), he says that he has been broken down on every side and that he has been pursued by both his friends and by God. God accepts Job’s arguing with him and affirms him in so doing. In the final chapter of the book, God says that he is angry with Job’s friends because they did not speak the truth about him, the way his servant Job did. So, the friends who said “it’s all your fault and God is right to punish you” were condemned and Job, who argued his case with God is affirmed.

The book of Job is important, therefore, because it tells us that it is ok to argue with God and to complain to him when life seems unfair. That is important because it is not how we have been brought up to think about relationship with God. Most of us instinctively think that submission to the will of God rather than arguing the toss with God is what makes for a good Christian. Job tells us that that is not so. And, in fact, if we read scripture carefully, we will finish that stories are told of all the heroes of the faith - from Abraham through Moses, Jeremiah and Habbakuk to Jesus and Paul - arguing with God. Why? Because it means we are in real relationship with God. Our virtuous mask comes off and we say what we really mean. We are honest with God in a way that we cannot be when we are trying to be righteous. That is real relationship and that is what God wants more than anything.

This is something which has been acknowledged and understood throughout Church history. The phrase which I used of Job at the beginning of this sermon - the dark night of the soul - was coined by St John of the Cross while imprisoned in a tiny prison cell for his attempts to reform the Church. He was a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who wrote many of his poems on a scroll smuggled to him by one of his guards. After escaping his captors, he wrote the Dark Night of the Soul, a poem about the painful experience that people endure as they seek to grow in spiritual maturity and union with God.

Similarly, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of “That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.”

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

At the end of the Book of Job, Job says, “I talked about things I did not understand, about marvels too great for me to know.” Through his dark night of the soul, he comes to understand that God is not who or what he had thought him to be. God is more than he had imagined or conceived. Human beings can know God but cannot know God fully because is always more than we can imagine or conceive. Every image or idea we have of God is inadequate because God is always more than any human definition. We can say, for example, that God is Father but to say that cannot fully define God as God can also be understood as Mother and as child and as Spirit (without gender). All these different things are true of God at one and the same time. So, God is both known to us and yet unknowable. In the dark night of the soul, all that we had thought we knew of God is taken away from us and we experience something of the mystery of God.

Summing all this up, what can we say? We need to be careful about the advice we offer to those who are suffering. In particular, not to assume that they have in some way brought their suffering on themselves. God said to Job’s friends, “you did not speak the truth about me, the way my servant Job did.” Then, to understand that we do not have to suffer in silence. To argue or complain to God actually brings us into a deeper relationship with him and is a valid part of prayer. Job says, “I still rebel and complain against God; I cannot keep from groaning.” Finally, we need to be prepared to have our understandings of God brought into question as he challenges us to engage with the mystery of who he is, the One who is always more than we can ever conceive or image. And so, like Job, we say “I talked about things I did not understand, about marvels too great for me to know.” May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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William Cowper - God Moves In A Mysterious Way.

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.

Inspired to Follow: Jesus Cleanses the Temple

Inspired to Follow: Art and the Bible Story is a programme of hour-long gatherings at St Martin-in-the-Fields over three terms covering the Biblical story from Creation to Apocalypse. It uses fine art paintings that can be found on St Martin’s doorstep as a springboard for exploring these two questions - What does it mean to follow Jesus today? How can I deepen my faith in God?

Today's session was entitled Jesus Cleanses the Temple and explored Mark 11 through ‘Christ driving the Traders from the Temple’ by El Greco. I gave the following reflection:
El Greco, which means 'The Greek', was born in Crete, which was then a Venetian possession. He “was trained as an icon painter … before he set about transforming himself into a disciple of Titian and an avid student of Tintoretto, Veronese, and Jacopo Bassano.”

He “moved to Venice in 1567, where he developed his intense, colourful Mannerist style” after first “mastering the elements of Renaissance painting, including perspective, figural construction, and the ability to stage elaborate narratives.” “He was in Rome in 1570 and studied the work of Michelangelo and Raphael.” “By 1577 he had settled in Toledo, Spain, where he lived the rest of his life, executing mostly pictures for local religious foundations.”

His art made a “radical assault on expected ways of depicting the body in space.” “He made elongated, twisting forms, radical foreshortening, and unreal colours the very basis of his art … [and] made these effects deeply expressive”.

In the face of the Protestant Reformation, “the Catholic church sought to reform its practices and reinforce belief in its doctrines. Spain put its vast resources … at the service of the church, and Toledo, because it was the seat of the archbishop, played an active role. The Council of Trent, which met in the mid-sixteenth century to clarify Counter-Reformation goals, explicitly recognized the importance of religious art. El Greco, whose patrons were primarily learned churchmen, responded with intelligent and expressive presentations of traditional and newly affirmed Catholic beliefs.” “In the 16th century the subject of [this painting] the Purification of the Temple was used as a symbol of the Church's need to cleanse itself both through the condemnation of heresy and through internal reform.”

“The most influential mystics of the Counter-Reformation were Spanish: Saint Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross and [Ignatius of] Loyola.” Teresa and John both worked “for the reform of the Carmelite order to bring it back to its primitive roots.” They transmit “to us profound spiritual experience; experience that is shaped by the Word made flesh, the self-emptying of Christ on the cross and his exaltation in resurrection.” They draw on a mystical theology exploring “that hidden state of experiencing God without images or concepts.”

“El Greco's heightened experience in his paintings makes you wonder if he, too, underwent … [similar] contacts with the divine.” “The personality [or emotion] of El Greco's painting is [ultimately] what is irreducible about it … but is the energy that shudders through it love, or anger?” Let’s think about that question in relation to this painting?

“In the time of Christ, the porch of the Temple in Jerusalem accommodated a market for buying sacrificial animals and changing money. Christ drove out the traders, saying, 'It is written "My house shall be called a house of prayer"; but you make it a den of thieves.' (Matthew 20). This episode is known as the Purification of the Temple.”

“Passover meant big business for Jerusalem-based merchants … Since it was impractical for those traveling from distant lands to bring their own animals, the merchants sold them the animals required for the sacrifices—at greatly inflated prices. The money changers also provided a necessary service. Every Jewish male twenty years of age or older had to pay the annual temple tax (Ex. 30:13–14; Matt. 17:24–27). But it could be paid only using Jewish or Tyrian coins … so foreigners had to exchange their money for acceptable coinage. Because they had a monopoly on the market, the money changers charged an exorbitant fee for their services (as high as 12.5 percent)." [F. F. Bruce, The Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 74].

“Watching in amazement as their Master dispersed the temple merchants, His disciples remembered that it was written in Psalm 69:9, “Zeal for Your house will consume me.” Jesus’ resolute passion and unwavering fervor was clear to all who saw Him. His righteous indignation, stemming from an absolute commitment to God’s holiness, revealed His true nature as the Judge of all the earth (cf. Gen. 18:25; Heb. 9:27).” (The Interpretation of St. John’s Gospel [Reprint; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1998], 207)

In the picture, “The scourging figure of Christ stands exactly centre stage. The merchants and traders have been placed to the left, a group of Apostles to the right. A crowd divided [like this] into good and evil halves is liable to bring the Last Judgement to mind. Two stone bas-reliefs in the background reinforce the association of the traders with sin and the Apostles with redemption. The relief above the traders shows the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise, while the one above the Apostles shows the Sacrifice of Isaac, traditionally understood as a prefiguration of Christ’s own redemptive sacrifice on the Cross.”

“The figure of Christ … resembles a flame, and perhaps the painting as a whole should be understood in the light of mystical experience – not as a depiction of a physical act, but as an image of a spiritual state, the culmination of prayer and meditation, when the radiance of Christ suddenly floods in on the individual at the moment of illumination.” In the words of St John of the Cross, as “The Living Flame of Love.”

So we have a painting in which elongated, twisting forms, foreshortening and unreal colours are deeply expressive of energies and emotions which inform the fiery expression or reform of the faith, in both institutions and individuals. A painting which seems to depict prayer and meditation culminating in emotions and actions which seek to reform and renew but do so through judgement and punishment.

The painting and the story raise profound questions for us:

• Are love and anger separate emotions or can they be combined?
• Are love and anger primarily emotions or are they also shown in actions?
• Can loving actions include an element of violence?
• Should our passion for God and for the reform of the Church or society involve a degree of anger; in other words is a righteous form of anger possible?

The songwriter John Bell has described Jesus as “A Saviour without safety” who is “inspired by love and anger” in addressing injustice. His hymn wants us to be as “disturbed by need and pain.” Yet, living, as we do, in a time when religious extremism extends to acts of decapitation, we may worry that this kind of ‘righteous anger’ can easily lead to justifying the kind of atrocities perpetrated by ISIS or, through theories of ‘just wars’, to disproportionate or illegal military interventions by the West.

The painting and the story may not fully answer all these questions but they certainly bring them vividly to life. Passion is clearly expressed; but is it love or anger or both that is being shown? Discuss.

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St John of the Cross - The Living Flame Of Love.

East London Three Faiths Forum Tour of the Holy Land: Day 6 (1)

During our visit to Mount Carmel I shared the following with the East London Three Faiths Forum group:

The Carmelite Order was founded by St Berthold in Palestine around 1154. Hermits, following the example of Elijah, adopted a solitary lifestyle on Mount Carmel. They lived in small cells near the spring called Elijah's fountain and practised shared solitude. After 1206 they asked the Patriarch of Jerusalem to draw up their way of life in a rule. This directs that they celebrate the eucharist daily and gather weekly to encourage and correct each other. Soon after they received their rule Jerusalem fell and they migrated to the West settling in Sicily, Italy, Spain, France and England.

Elijah was an inspiration to them as he was solitary figure on Mount Carmel, who challenged his people to chose one God. Elijah heard God as an unexpected whisper while on Mount Horeb and, as a result, what the Carmelites call Carmel is a way of life in which they try to be aware of the presence of God in the most ordinary, everyday things. Elijah also said, 'God lives in whose presence I stand', so Carmelites seek to recognise God in everyone they meet and serve.

St Teresa of Avila, who reformed the Carmelite Order in Spain in the late 1500's, said this, 'But here the Lord asks only two things of us: love of His Majesty and love of our neighbor. It is for these two virtues that we must strive, and if we attain them perfectly we are doing His will and so shall be united with Him. But, as I have said, how far we are from doing these two things in the way we ought for a God Who is great! May His Majesty be pleased to give us grace so that we may deserve to reach this state, as it is in our power to do if we wish. The surest sign that we are keeping these two commandments is, I think, that we should really be loving our neighbor; for we cannot be sure if we are loving God, although we may have good reasons for believing that we are, but we can know quite well if we are loving our neighbor.'

St Teresa spoke of prayer as sharing friendship with God. Their emphasis was on intimate communion with God as in this poem by St John of the Cross:

The Living Flame Of Love

Songs of the soul in the intimate communication of loving union with God.
O living flame of love that tenderly wounds my soul in its deepest center! Since now you are not oppressive, now consummate! if it be your will: tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!

O sweet cautery, O delightful wound! O gentle hand! O delicate touch that tastes of eternal life and pays every debt! In killing you changed death to life.

O lamps of fire! in whose splendors the deep caverns of feeling, once obscure and blind, now give forth, so rarely, so exquisitely, both warmth and light to their Beloved.

How gently and lovingly you wake in my heart, where in secret you dwell alone; and in your sweet breathing, filled with good and glory, how tenderly you swell my heart with love.

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U2 - The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Your cell will teach you everything

When Bishop Stephen, the Bishop of Chelmsford, was a parish priest in Huddersfield, a friend of his, who was involved in Adult Education, told him that a course on Zen Buddhist meditation could have been filled three times over and asked why the Church was not running a course on Christian meditation.

Bishop Stephen later moved to a role at the Cathedral in Peterborough and when he told this story there, the Head of Adult Education asked him to run a course on Christian meditation as part of the Adult Education programme. He did and the course filled up with a mix of those who were already Christians and those who would describe themselves are ‘searchers’.

This experience confirmed for Bishop Stephen his belief that, with the right kind of introduction, many people are open to the riches of Christian spirituality. What better time than Lent for exploring some of that tradition? Lent is a time for going deeper with God; for going deeper into our faith and the riches of its tradition, particularly in terms of prayer.

If we were to run a course on Christian meditation, what might it contain? Answering that question might give some ideas on aspects of the Church’s tradition and practice that we could explore this Lent, as part of going deeper into God through prayer.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers were hermits, monks and nuns who lived mainly in the Scetes desert of Egypt beginning around the third century AD. These informal gatherings of hermit monks and nuns became the model for Christian monasticism. Many of the wise words and teachings of these early desert monks and nuns were collected and are still in print as the ‘Sayings of the Desert Fathers.’

One such saying has a significant overlap with today’s Gospel reading: ‘Stay in your cell. Your cell will teach you everything.’ The idea being that being in conversation with God through prayer will teach us everything we need to know. For this reason, when he was interviewed recently by Radio 4 and was asked which wilderness would he go to for Lent if he could be taken any where in world, Bishop Stephen replied that he would stay in his own living room. The location for our prayer is not the main point (although quiet and privacy can help); instead the point is the quality and depth of our prayer.

Having said that, the Celtic Church has given us a model for the precise opposite; integrating prayer into our daily lives. Celtic Christians had a sense of the heavenly being found in the earthly, particularly in the ordinary tasks of home and work, which can blessed if we see God in our tasks and undertake our tasks as an act of worship to God.

This tradition was particularly strong in Gaelic countries and in the late 19th century Alexander Carmichael collected a number of the prayers and poems together in a book called the ‘Carmina Gadelica’ which ‘abounds with prayers invoking God’s blessing on such routine daily tasks as lighting the fire, milking the cow and preparing for bed.’ In more recent years, equivalent contemporary prayers have been written covering every aspect of daily life from turning on a computer to attending meetings, driving a car, stopping for a lunchbreak, and so on.

Some of the most visionary and passionate prayer in the history of the Church derived from the renewal of the Carmelite Order undertaken by St Teresa of Avila and St John ofthe Cross. Through quiet prayer, resting in contemplation of God which involved forgetting all earthly things, these attained occasionally prayers of union in which their whole being was absorbed in God.

They frequently described these experiences in terms of the union of lovers in marriage. St John, in particular, described in great poetry the experience of feeling abandoned by God which he described as the dark night of the soul. Their writings can help us understand those times when we feel God is very distant from us as well as those times when we feel an intimate closeness.     

St Ignatius of Loyola devised a series of prayer exercises which many have found particularly helpful in the development of their prayer life. The Examen is a daily process for reflecting on the events of the day in order to detect God’s presence and discern his direction for us. The Examen begins with prayer for light then continues through thanksgiving, reviewing our feelings and focus before concluding with future appointments and the Lord’s Prayer.

Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises are a compilation of meditations, prayers and contemplative practices developed to help people deepen their relationship with God. These are divided into four weeks; not seven day weeks but stages on our spiritual journey. Week 1 involves reflection on our lives in light of God’s boundless love for us. Week 2 involves imagining ourselves as Christ’s disciples as we reflect on the Gospel stories. Week 3 is meditation on the Last Supper, Christ’s passion and death, while Week 4 is meditation on the resurrection.

These are just some of the resources for prayer which can be found in the Christian tradition and which are available to all of us as we seek to go deeper into God this Lent. These resources can be found in books, through retreats, and by using online meditations. It is possible to travel to centres of prayer or to the world’s deserts and wildernesses in order to learn to pray in some of these ways. But we don’t have to! Like Bishop Stephen, we could take to heart the teachings of the Desert Fathers to stay in our cell and our cell will teach us everything. Our cell can be our own front room. If we use it for committed, regular prayer this Lent then like the saints, monks and mystics about whom we have thought this evening, we can go deeper into God.

Jesus said: ‘… go to your room, close the door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen. And your Father, who sees what you do in private, will reward you.’

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Live - Call Me A Fool.

Oxford Retreat House

I've had a wonderful couple of days on the retreat that my cell group share annually. There has been so much that we have shared over the years as we journey together, with the continued sense that God is walking with us.

This was the second occasion that our retreat has been at the Oxford Retreat House run by the Disclaced Carmelite Friars. 52 years ago, the Carmelite Order purchased Chilswell House, former home of Poet Laureate Robert Bridges. Since then, a community of Carmelite friars has followed a life of prayer and ministry in the spirit of St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. Their life revolves around the times of liturgical and personal silent prayer each day.

All guests are invited to join in this prayer. The Retreat Centre has recently been

extensively refurbished and welcomes a wide variety of groups. Set in 17 acres of woodland, and overlooking the ‘city of dreaming spires’, the Centre has 27 rooms, 13 of which are twin. The Centre offers preached and guided retreats, as well as weekends on various Carmelite-related themes. The Retreat House is also available for private groups and retreats. We couldn't wish for a better setting for our group retreat.

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Loreena McKennitt - The Dark Night Of The Soul.

R. B. Kitaj: Diasporist art

Diasporist art is the art of movement, change, migration, contradiction, dislocation and dissonance. R.B. Kitaj was both an artist and theorist of such art; writing two manifestos on the phenomenon and creating paintings which cleaved to his “own uncanny Jewish life of study, painting, unthinkable thoughts and near death …”

Because Kitaj’s childhood was spent in the US and much of his adult life in the UK, he was something of an outsider to both countries. Before becoming a student at the Royal College of Art, he travelled widely as a merchant seaman. Befriending the likes of David Hockney, Frank Auerbach, Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, he spent the best part of 40 years in the UK as part of the self-titled ‘School of London’ before the death of his second wife Sandra Fisher, which he blamed on negative reviews of his Tate retrospective, led to a final move to Los Angeles where he was to die in his studio by his own hand.

Kitaj defined the Diasporist artist as living and painting in two or more societies at once. It therefore seems appropriate that this retrospective is split between two venues; the Jewish Museum in London and Pallant House in Chichester.

Many of the works displayed are multilayered in their form and meaning. As works intended to provoke conversation they require our eye to roam because of the difficulty in focusing on a single part of the image. When combined with written commentaries for his Tate retrospective (inspired by the dialogical nature of Midrash) this approach in part provoked the furious reaction of some critics to the exhibition. Kitaj, however, understood his intent in terms of Diasporism:

“Diaspora is often inconsistent and tense; schismatic contradiction animates each day. To be consistent can mean the painter is settled and at home. All this begins to define the painting mode I call Diasporism. People are always saying the meanings in my pictures refuse to be fixed, to be settled, to be stable: that's Diasporism …”

Juan De La Cruz equates the uncertainty about their role and impact felt by US soldiers in Vietnam with that felt by St John of the Cross when torn between his loyalty to the church and his involvement in the reforms of St Teresa of Avila. Kitaj’s skill as a draughtsman can be seen in the wavering pose and questioning features of the conflicted African-American soldier on a transport plane around which Kitaj has collaged the crude scenes of wartime abuses which are troubling the soldier’s conscience. His name tag is the clue to the creative dissonance Kitaj introduced into the work by linking the soldier’s conflicts to those of John of the Cross.

The Church is called to be a pilgrim people journeying in the tension of the now and not yet. As a result, we have much, potentially, to learn from Diasporist art and yet our frequent tendency is to bathe in a nostalgic yearning for days of ‘glory’ past in Christendom. Diasporism is for Kitaj an engagement with the outsider; not Jews alone, but also homosexuals, women, Palestinians, Afro-Americans, and many of the Modernist artists he so admired. Such inclusivism challenges our nostalgia revealing the hidden oppression and abuse which can accompany the accumulation of authority and power.

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Lou Reed - Strawman.

Retreat reading

I'm just back from my annual cell group retreat (with fellow bloggers Sam Norton and Paul Trathen, among others) which this year took place at the Carmelite Priory at Boars Hill. Here are some of the highlights from my retreat reading which reflect our Carmelite setting:

"Applying the practice of the Übersichtliche Darstellung, then, to our 'mystical investigations', here we observe a process of watching or seeing the 'Form of Life' (Lebensform) through the 'language games' (Sprachspiele) that are employed. Our job is not to make mystical interpretations of certain Weltanschauungen but to present 'everything as it is'. The ontological questions no longer concern us. When Wittgenstein's approach is applied to the spiritual realm, its application is neatly summarized by Drury's remarks concerning The Tractatus:

For me, from the very first, and ever since, and still now, certain sentences from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus stuck in my mind like arrows, and have determined the direction of my thinking. They are these:

1. 'Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly'
2. 'Philosophy will signify what cannot be said by presenting clearly what can be said'
3. 'There are, indeed, things which cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are mystical'.
(Drury 1973:iv)

... Drury ... delineated the relationship between (1) the need to speak clearly - the Übersichtliche Blick of the philosopher, and (2) how this relates to the 'unsayable' and the 'mystical'. By delineating what can be said clearly we also delineate what cannot be said but can be shown. This ... is the role of the philosopher who investigates 'the mystical' ... 

the Wittgensteinian approach advocated here concentrates the mystic 'speech act' in it's overall communicative intent; that is, through showing as well as saying. This leads to the notion ... of the 'performative discourse of mystical speech'."

"... the Wittgensteinian move from Weltanschauungen to Weltbild under the Übersichtliche Darstellung - from mind/body Cartesian dualism to a post-enlightenment suspicion of the Cartesian 'I' - mirrors the strategies of 'mystical discourse'. The mystical strategies ... of unknowing and affectivity ... are held alike by the contemporary post-enlightenment discourse of Wittgenstein and the pre-enlightenment discourse of theologia mystica. That is, with the 'postmodern' critique of Cartesian dualism we return to a 'pre-modern' notion of self. Both discourses share similar strategies and ... for both 'style' is as important as 'content'.

Both Teresa and Wittgenstein ... are in their own ways inviting their readers to move 'out of the head' into embodied practices. This ... is the key 'transformational strategy' of both Ludwig Wittgenstein and the writers of the Christian tradition of theologia mystica:

A religious question is either a 'life question' or (empty) chatter. This language game, we could say, only deals with 'life questions'.
(Wittgenstein BEE 183:202)"

Peter Tyler, The Return To The Mystical

"Mysticism is a protean term used to signify a variety of disparate phenomena from the sublime to the trivial, from the effusions of the God-intoxicated saint to the babblings of the hallucinogen-intoxicated addict. It runs the gamut from St Teresa's mansions of the soul to Timothy Leary's neural cocoon ... Although mysticism is a puzzle it should be kept in mind that its often exotic language and the bizarre phenomenon associated with it hinge on a single point: If God exists - and the consensus of the Mystics of the Book (that is, the followers of Judaism, Christianity, Islam) believe that He does - then God is the ultimate goal of human life. Moreover, He is a goal which humankind cannot attain by its efforts alone. Divine aid is necessary. The conviction that the beatific vision is grounded on God, the lumen gloriae of the theologians, delivered Christianity from becoming no more than another priggish intellectual sect or esoteric mystery religion ... It can be said that the mystic claims to be able to penetrate the carapace of the external world, view the beauty within, and ascend to its source, the "all-beautiful One" of St Augustine. That the mystic is directed towards this vision is often lost in the horrifying penances and bizarre exotica that glut their accounts." R. A. Herrera, Silent Music: The Life, Work, and Thought of St John of the Cross  

“I would still argue that everyone, no matter how confused or ill-situated in life, can have at least modest mystical experiences. They may be as simple as the beautiful stillness that settles at the sight of a sunset or a brief period of wonder at the birth of a child. Mysticism doesn’t have to be a life profession. Further, I think that much of our depression, anxiety, and addiction has to do with what John writes about: the soul’s need and longing for transcendence. This need is instinctual and unavoidable.” Thomas Moore, Foreword to M. Starr trans., St John of the Cross: Dark Night of the Soul

“God stripped Job naked and left him on a dunghill, vulnerable and persecuted by his friends. The ground was teeming with worms. Job was filled with anguish and bitterness. This was exactly when God Most High, he who lifts the poor man from the dunghill, was pleased to come down and speak with him face-to-face. This is when God revealed to Job the depths and heights of his wisdom, which he had never done in the time of Job’s prosperity.” St John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul

"Men invent means and methods of coming at God's love, they learn rules and set up devices to remind them of that love, and it seems like a world of trouble to bring oneself into the consciousness of God's presence. Yet it might be so simple. Is it not quicker and easier just to do our common business wholly for the love of him?" 

 "Nor is it needful that we should have great things to do. . . We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before him, who has given me grace to work; afterwards I rise happier than a king. It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground for the love of God." 

"The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament." 

Brother Lawrence, Practising the Presence of God 

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Steve Bell - Kindness.

Job and the Dark Night of the Soul

The book of Job is the record of one man’s dark night of the soul. In the story Job loses everything that gave his life meaning. His family are wiped out, his home, money and possessions are lost, he experiences severe and painful illnesses and is left alone, except for three friends who are more hindrance than help as they offer only platitudes that essentially pin the blame for his condition on Job himself.

Job knows that the diagnosis offered by his friends is wrong. He knows there is nothing he has done to deserve his suffering. He knows that it is not punishment for something he has done and this gives us one of the reasons why this is such a significant book to find within the pages of the scriptures. The book of Job tells us that much suffering in this world is undeserved. There are times in life when we do reap what we sow and bear the consequences of our choices, as Job’s friends assume must be the case for him. But this is not one of those times and the story is told, in part, to warn us against making the assumptions made by Job’s friends. Not all suffering is brought on by our actions, sometimes life simply deals us a bum hand - and that’s the way it is!

Job is understandably angry about this situation. In the section of the poem we heard read today (Job 23. 1-9, 16-end), he is so angry that he argues the toss with God, saying "I still rebel and complain against God; I cannot keep from groaning." God accepts Job’s arguing with him and affirms him in so doing. In the final chapter of the book, God says that he is angry with Job’s friends because they did not speak the truth about him, the way his servant Job did. So, the friends who said "it’s all your fault and God is right to punish you" were condemned and Job, who argued his case with God is affirmed.

The book of Job is important, therefore, because it tells us that it is ok to argue with God and to complain to him when life seems unfair. That is important because it is not how we have been brought up to think about relationship with God. Most of us instinctively think that submission to the will of God rather than arguing the toss with God is what makes for a good Christian. Job tells us that that is not so. And, in fact, if we read scripture carefully we will finish that stories are told of all the heroes of the faith - from Abraham through Moses, Jeremiah and Habbakuk to Jesus and Paul - arguing with God. Why? Because it means we are in real relationship with God. Our virtuous mask comes off and we say what we really mean. We are honest with God in a way that we cannot be when we are trying to be righteous. That is real relationship and that is what God wants more than anything.

This is something which has been acknowledged and understood throughout Church history. The phrase which I used of Job at the beginning of this sermon - the dark night of the soul - was coined by St John of the Cross while imprisoned in a tiny prison cell for his attempts to reform the Church. He was a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who wrote many of his poems on a scroll smuggled to him by one of his guards. After escaping his captors, he wrote the Dark Night of the Soul, a poem about the painful experience that people endure as they seek to grow in spiritual maturity and union with God.

Similarly, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of "That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God."

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

At the end of the Book of Job, Job says, "I talked about things I did not understand, about marvels too great for me to know." Through his dark night of the soul, he comes to understand that God is not who or what he had thought him to be. God is more than he had imagined or conceived. Human beings can know God but cannot know God fully because is always more than we can imagine or conceive. Every image or idea we have of God is inadequate because God is always more than any human definition. We can say, for example, that God is Father but to say that cannot fully define God as God can also be understood as Mother and as child and as Spirit (without gender). All these different things are true of God at one and the same time. So God is both known to us and yet unknowable. In the dark night of the soul, all that we had thought we knew of God is taken away from us and we experience something of the mystery of God.

Summing all this up, what can we say? We need to be careful about the advice we offer to those who are suffering. In particular, not to assume that they have in some way brought their suffering on themselves. God said to Job’s friends, "you did not speak the truth about me, the way my servant Job did." Then, to understand that we do not have to suffer in silence. To argue or complain to God actually brings us into a deeper relationship with him and is a valid part of prayer. Job says, "I still rebel and complain against God; I cannot keep from groaning." Finally, we need to be prepared to have our understandings of God brought into question as he challenges us to engage with the mystery of who he is, the One who is always more than we can ever conceive or image. And so, like Job, we say "I talked about things I did not understand, about marvels too great for me to know."

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Julie Miller - By Way Of Sorrow.