Between: traherne

Showing posts with label traherne. Show all posts

Sunday, 22 September 2024

Whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me

Here's the sermon I recorded as this Sunday's weekly sermon for the Diocese of Chelmsford (Mark 9:30-37):

The disciples had been arguing among themselves – nothing changes there, then, we might be tempted to think! They had been arguing about which of them was the greatest and thinking of what they could get out of the movement that Jesus began. What they wanted was prestige and power by being elevated over all the other disciples to what they thought of as the position of influence at the right hand of Christ. Jesus turned their thinking about what is important and about prestige and power on its head. In the kingdom of God, service; thinking of and care for others is what counts, not personal advancement, position or power. What can I do for you, not what can I do for me!

At a training weekend for new curates the then Bishop of Barking, David Hawkins, performed a handstand to demonstrate the way in which Jesus, through his teaching in the beatitudes, turns our understanding of life upside down. He was thinking of the way in which Jesus startles us as paradox, irony and surprise permeate his teachings flipping our expectations upside down: the least are the greatest; adults become like children; the religious miss the heavenly banquet; the immoral receive forgiveness and blessing. Bishop David's action turned our expectations, as curates, of Bishops and their behaviour upside-down at the same time that it perfectly illustrated his point.

Years before Jesus was born, the prophet Isaiah had promised a child born for us who would establish endless peace upheld with justice and righteousness. Isaiah described a time when the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard would lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, with a little child leading them (Isaiah 11.1-9).

Isaiah's vision of the peaceable kingdom was centred on a child born to be the Prince of Peace. When that promised child came among us at Jesus, he said: ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs’; ‘Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’; ‘Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’ and ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’ The child born for us calls us to welcome children and become like children. The most radical reversal in a culture where elders were revered is that “the greatest among you must become like the youngest.”

In 2022, several of Nicola Ravenscroft’s EarthAngel sculptures were exhibited at St Andrew’s in Wickford. These bronze sculptures are of children, simply dressed in soft silk tulle, who hesitate in time, leaning forward, hopeful, poised to dive into life, eyes closed, dreaming into their future, anticipating things unseen. Nicola says that her EarthAngels are youngling messengers of peace and healing, guardians of our future.

One reason why the promised child calls us to become like children is that children see the peaceable kingdom, until adults teach them otherwise. Children don’t argue amongst themselves for prestige and position until adults have taught them to do so. That is why the children are our future and can lead the way into a better future. We need, as Thomas Traherne wrote, to unlearn the dirty devices of this world in order to become, as it were, a little child again that we may enter into the Kingdom of God.

By telling his disciples that “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all”, Jesus turns the meaning of greatness and leadership upside down. No longer are they to be understood in terms of garnering wealth and power for oneself. Now they are understood to be about service; giving your life that others might live. Jesus, as the servant King, says to us, ‘I, your Lord and Teacher, have just washed your feet. You, then, should wash one another’s feet. I have set an example for you, so that you will do just what I have done for you.’

Michael Curry, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, in his statement on the coronavirus outbreak reminded us that: ‘Jesus came among us in the first place, to show us … how to live not simply as collections of individual self-interest, but how to live as the human family of God. That’s why he said love the Lord your God, love your neighbor as yourself. Because in that is hope for all of us to be the human family of God.’

Through her EarthAngels, Nicola Ravenscroft extends this call and example to include our care for the earth and the creatures it supports. Her sculptures are “earth’s messenger-angels: silently calling us all to live in peace with nature”: “Earth’s children are life’s heartbeat: they are her hope, her future ... they are breath of Earth herself. Creative, inquisitive and trusting, children are Earth’s possibility thinkers. They seek out, and flourish in fellowship, in ‘oneness’, and being naturally open-hearted, and wide-eyed hungry for mystery, delight and wonder, they embrace diversity with the dignity of difference.”

These are the children we are called to welcome, the children we are to become, the children to whom the peaceable kingdom belongs. Nicola’s EarthAngels stand together, peacefully, as friends, vulnerable and strong, silently singing out their call to change. These little children lead with trusting feet, plump and bare. The Prince of Peace is with them and calls us to let them lead the way. Will you be among those who follow?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Raphael Ravenscroft - "... and a little child shall lead ..." Isaiah 11:6.

Wednesday, 1 November 2023

Artlyst: November Art Diary

My November Art Diary for Artlyst highlights exhibitions in Cambridge, Venice, Hastings, Lisbon, St David’s, Cookham and Colchester which explore aspects of relationships. These range from the familial to the transcendent through the work of Chantal Joffe, Celia Paul, Nengi Omuku, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Raul Speek, Stanley Spencer and Roger Wagner, among others:

'‘Everywhere is Heaven: Stanley Spencer & Roger Wagner’ is the Stanley Spencer Gallery’s first collaboration with a living artist. Roger Wagner has been deeply inspired by Stanley Spencer’s paintings, and both artists have been described as ‘visionary geniuses’, each seeking to evoke the mystical in everyday experience. Just as Spencer found Cookham to be ‘heaven on earth’, so Wagner evokes biblical happenings in contemporary settings.

A number of works by Wagner, who is also a published poet, will be hung alongside Spencer’s from the Gallery Collection and the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, including ‘Builders of the Tower of Babel’ and ‘Making Columns for the Tower of Babel’. The two artists are united by a love of ‘metaphysicals’, as Spencer would have said, including the poets John Donne and Thomas Traherne. Traherne, in particular, wrote with a visionary innocence and found mysticism in the natural world. The title of the exhibition references Spencer’s own words about his painting, ‘John Donne arriving in Heaven’, which has been loaned for this exhibition, and his description of the four figures facing in all directions because ‘everywhere is heaven so to speak’.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Roger Wagner - I Saw The Seraphim.

Sunday, 9 July 2023

Come as a child

Here is the reflection I shared in today's Eucharist at St Andrew's Wickford:

The poem called ‘Song of Childhood’ by Peter Handke which features in the film Wings of Desire captures, for me, something of the openness of childhood when the world lies open before us and we encounter it without cynicism or prior knowledge. The big questions of life are in front of us but we have yet found answers or the pretence that we can know all the answers.

In the poem the child has retained that openness to life and existence as she or he has grown but in our gospel reading (Matthew 11. 25-30) today we hear of people who have not. When Jesus speaks about the wise and the intelligent, he is speaking of those who think they already have knowledge of what God wants. They are those who cannot receive the new thing that God wants to give because they think they already know all there is to know. As a result, they are closed off to what God wants to share.

Jesus says that those able to receive are like children. They are not worldly wise or information wise and, as a result, they are open to what is new and what is revealed. This is how we need to be if we are to receive what God has revealed to us in Jesus.

Tom Wright says this: “Jesus had come to know his father the way a son does: not by studying books about him, but by living in his presence, listening for his voice, and learning from him as an apprentice does from a master, by watching and imitating. And he was now discovering that the wise and learned were getting nowhere, and that the ‘little people’ – the poor, the sinners, the tax collectors, ordinary folk – were discovering more of God, simply by following him, Jesus, than the learned specialists who declared that what he was doing didn’t fit with their complicated theories.”

Sister Corita Kent has described the way in which children look and learn:

“Ask [a] child to come from the front of the house to the back and closely observe her small journey. It will be full of pauses, circling, touching and picking up in order to smell, shake, taste, rub, and scrape. The child’s eyes won’t leave the ground, and every piece of paper, every scrap, every object along the path will be a new discovery.

It does not matter that his is all familiar territory – the same house, the same rug and chair. To the child, the journey of this particular day, with its special light and sound, has never been made before. So the child treats the situation with the open curiosity and attention that it deserves.

The child is quite right.”

Sister Corita went on to argue that through practice adults can learn once again to see as children do. She suggested that the kind slow looking practised by children, like prayer and art, enables us to view life without being distracted and allows us to put all our attention on a special area for a time. When we slow ourselves and focus our attention in this way we begin to receive what the world around has to show us; we notice things that others don’t and come to see that ordinary things are wondrous. The art historian John Ruskin claimed that the power of seeing in this way is ‘the teaching of all things,’ and that ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.’

This is a form of prayer taking us to a place and space full of delight and wonder; prayer, poetry and prophecy. Children naturally see this through the attention that they pay to the world around them, until we, as adults, teach them otherwise. Like the poet Thomas Traherne, we need to unlearn the dirty devices of this world in order to become, as it were, a little child again that we may enter into the Kingdom of God.

Unless you come,
come as a child,
not grasping but trusting,
not arrogantly but humbly,
not resisting but accepting,
not feebly but vigorously,
not giving but receiving,
not self-centred but God-centred,
not teaching but feeding,
not gaining life but losing life,
not leaving but returning,
not closed, but open.

Unless you come,
come as a child,
you cannot enter
the kingdom of God.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Van Morrison - Song Of Being A Child.

Friday, 25 December 2020

And a little child shall lead them

Here's my sermon for Midnight Mass at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.

What does Christmas look like today? Artist Nicola Ravenscroft has given us a vivid portrayal in her installation ‘With the Heart of a Child.’ It's on display below us in our crypt. The crypt is currently closed, so I'm going to describe the sculpture to you. It shows us seven life-size bronze children - one from every continent on Earth. Each one is simply dressed in soft silk. Each is leaning forward hopefully as if poised to dive into the future. Their eyes are closed as if they are dreaming into their future, anticipating things unseen.

Nicola writes that, as mother, and artist, she has agonised at the sight of our fractured society, our impending climate catastrophe, and our collective fear. She sees a desperate need for creativity and togetherness to arrest this. Her belief is that children can quietly lead us into recognising the truth of our ‘universal ONENESS, our oneness with each other and our oneness with the Earth’. So, her response to the challenges we currently face, especially this Christmas, has been to create this international group of little leaders pointing us towards understanding and TOGETHERNESS. They are an encouragement ‘to do whatever it takes to find solutions, to heal our broken planet, and so, to save our future.’

The prophet Isaiah promised a child born for us who would establish endless peace upheld with justice and righteousness: ‘For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.’ Isaiah also told of a little child who shall lead. He described a time when the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

Isaiah's vision of the peaceable kingdom was centred on a child born to be the Prince of Peace. When that promised child came among us, he said: ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs’, ‘Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’, ‘Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’ and ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’

So, the child born for us in Bethlehem leads us to become like children. Why is this so? I want to suggest two reasons. The first is about a vulnerability revealing the interdependence of which Nicola speaks and the second, a way of looking revealing our connection with creation.

First, vulnerability. The Christmas story is that the God we think of as an all-powerful protector chose to become wholly dependent on human beings for his own protection. As a human baby God was wholly dependent on other human beings, primarily Mary and Joseph, for his protection and, as we hear regularly on the news, human beings don’t actually have a very good track record when it comes to treating children well. God was willing to take the risk of coming into our world; a world in which genocides occur and in which innocent children are abused and die - as happened with the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem and beyond, a world in which he, though innocent, was tortured as a criminal and strung up on a cross to die:

“And the word became … / Wordless / Flesh / A baby with no words / And the voice of the maker became a hungry voice / A cry for food / A cry for milk / The voice that made gravity cried out for fear of falling / The voice that made women cries for a woman’s breast and screams with disappointment when it is denied …

Then now God is this small thing / Is a baby / Is a baby that can be dropped or hurt or left unfed, left unchanged, left wet and smelly / Or be child-abused.” (‘Image of the Invisible,’ Late, Late Service)

That was the reality of the incarnation and of the Christmas story. That is what it meant for Jesus to be born. It is the ultimate identification. God became flesh and blood and moved into our neighbourhood with all that that involves, not just at the beginning of his life but throughout. Why does this matter? It is when we are vulnerable that we are most aware of our need of others; that intrinsic interdependence that Nicola suggests is revealed to us by our experience of birth and childhood.

The sense of vulnerability engendered by the pandemic originally brought us a sense of community like never before as neighbours left notes offering help to those in their streets, as food banks supplied those in need, as we stood on our streets to applaud NHS and care workers, and as those same workers give sacrificially to care for those in need. If we follow the little child who leads we will see more community connection because, if we develop the heart of a child, our sense of vulnerability will reveal our interdependence and need one of another.

The second path to connection through childlikeness is about looking. As a baby Jesus was wholly dependent on others, as a child he began to explore the world around him using his sight, because sight precedes speech. We know from his parables and teaching that his learning was firmly rooted in the natural cycles of sowing, growing and reaping combined with deep appreciation for the beauty of the natural world, including the lilies of the field, and the value of each creature, including sparrows that cannot fall without God knowing. This understanding and appreciation derived from the attention he paid as a child to the natural world around him.

Artist and nun Sister Corita Kent once described a child’s journey from the front of the house to the back to illustrate the way children see the world, the attention they pay to it, and the wonder that they find. That short journey would ‘be full of pauses, circling, touching and picking up in order to smell, shake, taste, rub, and scrape’, ‘every object along the path will be a new discovery’ because ‘the child treats the situation with the open curiosity and attention that it deserves.’

Sister Corita went on to argue that through practice adults can learn once again to see as children do. She suggested that the kind slow looking practised by children, like prayer and art, enables us to view life without being distracted and allows us to put all our attention on a special area for a time. As would have been the case for the child Jesus, when we slow ourselves and focus our attention in this way we begin to receive what the world around has to show us; we notice things that others don’t and come to see that ordinary things are wondrous. The art historian John Ruskin claimed that the power of seeing in this way is ‘the teaching of all things,’ and that ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.’

This is a form of prayer taking us to a place and space full of delight and wonder; prayer, poetry and prophecy. In this prayerful space and attitude we see the peaceable kingdom into which the child born in Bethlehem wishes to lead us. For many of us that was part of our original lockdown experience, as we walked in green spaces and, in the silence, heard the birds sing like never before.

Children naturally see that peaceable kingdom through the attention that they pay to the world around them, until we, as adults, teach them otherwise. That is why the children are our future and can lead the way into a better future. Like the poet Thomas Traherne, we need to unlearn the dirty devices of this world in order to become, as it were, a little child again that we may enter into the Kingdom of God.

Nicola Ravenscroft intuitively understands these truths and, as a maternal sculptor, creates children that through their connection to nature grant us a vision of the peaceable kingdom toward which they wish to lead us. In words taken from the novelist Joseph Conrad, her urgent prayer is that the children she has sculpted, ‘shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders, that feeling of unavoidable solidarity: of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds all to each other, and all humankind to the visible world.’

These are the children the adult Jesus called us to welcome, the children we are to become, the children to whom the peaceable kingdom belongs. They stand together peacefully in our Crypt as friends, vulnerable and strong, silently singing out their call to change. These little bronze children lead with trusting feet, plump and bare. The Prince of Peace is with them and calls us to let them lead the way saying the kingdom of heaven belongs to children, and anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.

Our world with its current catastrophes, fractures in society, and collective fears is crying out for change and hope. The baby born at Bethlehem remains the sign that we, too, need to be born again if our world is to know new life and fresh hope. That is the Christmas we need today and so, together with Nicola, my prayer is that we let the baby wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger lead us to become like children ourselves; open to vulnerability, embracing interdependence, paying prayerful attention to the world and thereby entering Christ’s peaceable kingdom.

I will be continuing to explore the themes of the sermon in a new series of posts called 'Seeing is receiving: The art of contemplation', the first of which will follow this post. Click here to read the first post in this new series.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Randall Thompson - The Peaceable Kingdom.

Sunday, 1 December 2013

Anglican, nature and metaphysical poets

Mia Anderson, priest and winner of the Montreal International Poetry Prize, is interviewed in the current edition of the Church Times.

In the interview, she highlights the long tradition of poet-priests including John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Euros Bowen, R.S. Thomas, Rowan Williams and David Scott, among others. She locates herself with the nature poets of any country including Henry Vaughan, Don McKay, Tim Liburn, Jan Zwicky and Mark Tredinnick.

Poetry also features in an insightful interview by Michael Symmons Roberts with John Drury in which they discuss the relative merits of the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John Donne - At The Round Earth's Imagined Corners.

Wednesday, 22 December 2010

Of beauty or affirmation

Sam Norton recently posted on the subject of beauty and his post got me thinking about the extent to which beauty can be identified or defined. The proverb, 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' suggests that beauty is entirely subjective. Clearly 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.

One of the fascinating things about contemporary art is the way in which it often finds beauty in the throw-away, the ready-made, the hidden or disregarded e.g. Martin Creed’s Work No. 88 - a crumpled ball of paper. In a culture of detritus, American Beauty screenwriter Alan Ball uncovers heartbreaking beauty in garbage with a scene in which a crummy old plastic bag floats in the wind above a dirty sidewalk.

My friend, Alan Stewart, in his ‘Icons or Eyesores’ presentation on spirituality in contemporary art shows people a photo of a sepia-tinged crucifix. Most people quite like it until they are told that it is ‘Piss Christ’ by Andres Serrano and that the crucifix is submerged in the artist’s urine. Serrano has said that the image is about the commercialisation of religious iconography (a critique of Christian kitsch!) but Alan sees it as a depiction of the incarnation, with God coming into the detritus and waste of human life, and that, it seems to me, is profoundly beautiful.

The incarnation is particularly relevant to this debate because, while in no sense a conventionally beautiful act (see Philippians 2. 6-8), it is the ultimate affirmative act based on the understanding that nothing is lost and everything can be redeemed. For this reason, I think that affirmation is a more helpful concept to us than beauty as, rather than separating out the beautiful from the ugly as in conceptions of beauty, affirmation seeks to see the image of God in all things.

This is the approach of Charles Williams who, in The Descent of the Dove, writes this:

"... the Incarnation ... produces a phrase which is the very maxim of the Affirmative Way: "Not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh but by taking of the manhood into God." And not only of the particular religious Way, but of all progress of all affirmations: it is the actual manhood which is to be carried on, and not the height which is to be brought down. All images are, in their degree to be carried on; mind is never to put off matter; all experience is to be gathered in."

Christine Mary Hearn notes that the Way of Affirmation holds that "God is manifest in many things and can be known through these things" as in Psalm 19. 1: 'the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament his handiwork.' She notes too that it is the way of poets as was the case with Anne Ridler whose "devoted Anglicanism" was inspired by this philosophy found in her friend Charles Williams and the 17th-century poet Thomas Traherne. The Way of Affirmation should have particular resonance for Anglicans as the Genius of Anglicanism (greatly under strain in its present divisions) is its affirmation of both Catholicism and Protestantism.

Philippians 4.8 - "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things" - encourages us to follow the Affirmative Way. No criteria is outlined for these categories, leaving us to interpret them for ourselves, but the assumption is made that if we seek such things we will find them.

Simone Weil sets out a methodology for the Affirmative Way when she writes 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." Such a way of praying underpins much of the contemporary spirituality which draws on perceptions of Celtic Christianity. David Adam, for example, writes that:

“Much of Celtic prayer spoke naturally to God in the working place of life. There was no false division into sacred and secular. God pervaded all and was to be met in their daily work and travels. If our God is to be found only in our churches and our private prayers, we are denuding the world of His reality and our faith of credibility. We need to reveal that our God is in all the world and waits to be discovered there – or, to be more exact, the world is in Him, all is in the heart of God. Our work, our travels, our joys and our sorrows are enfolded in His loving care. We cannot for a moment fall out of the hands of God. Typing pool and workshop, office and factory are all as sacred as the church. The presence of God pervades the work place as much as He does a church sanctuary.” (Power Lines: Celtic Prayers about Work, SPCK, 1992)

Other examples of similar styles of prayer include, Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica, a collection of Gaelic prayers and poems collected in the late 19th century, which “abounds with prayers invoking God’s blessing on such routine daily tasks as lighting the fire, milking the cow and preparing for bed.” Many of George Herbert’s poems use everyday imagery (mainly church-based as he was also a priest) and are based on the idea that God is found everywhere within his world. Ray Simpson and Ruth Burgess have provided series of contemporary blessings for everyday life covering computers, exams, parties, pets, cars, meetings, lunchtimes, days off and all sorts of life situations from leaving school and a girl’s first period to divorce, redundancy and mid-life crises.

Martin Wallace sums up this sense of paying prayerful attention to the everyday in order to affirm God's presence in the everyday when he writes: “Just as God walked with Adam in the garden of Eden, so he now walks with us in the streets of the city chatting about the events of the day and the images we see” (City Prayers, The Canterbury Press, 1994). He encourage us to “chat with God in the city, bouncing ideas together with him, between the truths of the Bible and the truths of urban life” and, “as you walk down your street, wait for the lift, or fumble for change at the cash-till … to construct your own prayers of urban imagery.”

Viewed in this way, Work No. 88 and the plastic bag scene from American Beauty are examples of the kind of prayerful attention which characterises the Way of Affirmation.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Van Morrison - In The Garden.