Let me go, because then the Spirit will come

Here's my reflection, with a new meditation, from the Ascension Day Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Imagine how the disciples must first have felt when they heard that Jesus was planning to leave them in order to return to his Father. They had had an incredible roller-coaster three years of ministry together with him which had culminated in the agony of watching him die. They thought that they had lost him and that all their hopes and dreams had been dashed. Then there was the joy of the resurrection; the dawning realisation that Jesus was alive, was still with them and was not lost to them after all.

And then the Ascension. The Jesus that they thought they had regained left them. What was that all about? There was so much that they still had to learn? There was so much that they could have done together? Why?

Because Jesus was physically distancing himself from the disciples at the Ascension, there is a similarity to the words that Jesus spoke to Mary Magdalene when she became the first to recognise him after his resurrection. As she did so, she naturally reached out to embrace him but his words to her were, “Touch me not.” Why?

There is a strand of theology which is called ‘the Negative Way.’ Within this way of thinking about God all images and understandings of God are consistently given up and let go because they are human constructions that can only show part of what God is.

So, all talk of Jesus as shepherd, lamb, son, brother, friend, master, servant, king, lord, saviour, redeemer and so on goes out of the window because God is always more than the images that we construct to understand him. In saying that, I was speaking of God as being masculine, something which is, again, only a limited human understanding of God. Ultimately, God is neither male nor female but is Spirit and the Negative Way says that in order to encounter God as being beyond our limited imaginations and understandings we need to give up and let go of all our human ways of describing him.

The Ascension and Jesus’ words to Mary seem to say something similar. Jesus seems to be saying to the disciples, “Don’t cling on to me. Let go of me as you know me because, when you do, you will gain a greater experience, less limited experience, of me. Don’t cling on to me. Let me go, because then the Spirit will come.”

To let go of what is safe and familiar and secure in order to be open to encounter what is beyond is both scary and exhilarating. Yet, it has been, in part, a key part of our experience for many of us during lockdown. It is what Jesus calls us to here and it is the way in which we encounter the Spirit in our lives.

The title of a song by the ska band Madness, ‘One Step Beyond,’ became a catchphrase in my previous parish that developed real spiritual meaning by challenging us to go further in living out our Christian faith, to go one step beyond where we are now in the way that we live as Christians. The Ascension seems to challenge us to go at least one step beyond where we are now in our understanding of God. We need to leave the safety, security and familiarity of the past in order to encounter the new thing that God is doing in the present.

The Ascension teaches us that nothing is sacred: not buildings, not books, not actions, not people; not even Jesus as the disciples encountered him! We must always move beyond our understanding of the place, space, people and realisations that we have now because that is how the Spirit comes!

Touch me not.
I am not yours
to have and hold,
in this shape
in this form.
Let go.
Let me go.
Let my Spirit come.
Divine my Spirit,
know me
within.

An absence
that is presence.
A leave-taking
that is arrival.
A loss of God
that is
being found
in God –
being in God,
being one
with God.

Touch me not
as flesh and blood.
Touch me now
in bread.
Consume me.
Let me in,
within,
as wine
divine.
Elements,
Spirit -
I in you,
and you
in me.

I ascend -
human in heaven.
Understanding,
interceding -
humanity
at the heart
of Godhead
filling the
human-shaped
space
in the very heart
of God.

Do also join us later today at 8.00pm on BBC Radio 4 for a celebration for Ascension Day. That service will be led by our Vicar, the Revd Dr Sam Wells, and the Revd Marie-Elsa Bragg, with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, The Daily Service Singers and St Martin's Voices.

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Hail The Day That Sees Him Rise.

Artlyst - Christopher Clack: Connecting The Material And Immaterial

My latest article for Artlyst is an interview with the artist Christopher Clack who says that for as long as he can remember there has always been an element of religious imagery or content in the work has has produced:

'Art is, above all a practice. It is ‘doing’ and ‘living’. Religion, too, is a practice and something to be lived. Both have less to do with what we believe, and more to do with what we discover. This, I think, is common ground. What, if anything, do you see being built on this common ground? A place where religion looks more like art and art, more like religion.'

My visual meditation on Christopher Clack's 'Descent II' can be found here.

My other Artlyst pieces are:

Interviews:

• Peter Howson Artlyst Interview
• Marleen Hengelaar-Rookmaaker On The Legacy Of ArtWay
• Alastair Gordon A Testament To His Faith
• Katrina Moss Chaiya Art Awards Interview: Where is God in our 21st century world?
• Apocalypse Now: Michael Takeo Magruder Interviewed
• Jonathan Anderson: Religious Inspirations Behind Modernism
• Caravan – An Interview With Rev Paul Gordon Chandler On Arts Peacebuilding
• Art Awakening Humanity Alexander de Cadenet Interviewed
• Michael Pendry New Installation Lights Up St Martin In The Fields
• Mark Dean Projects Stations of the Cross Videos On Henry Moore Altar

Articles:

• Arnulf Rainer: 90th Birthday Exhibition Celebrated At Albertina Museum
• A Belonging Project And Exiles Loss and Displacement
• Robert Polidori: Fra Angelico Opus Operantis
• Art, Faith, Church Patronage and Modernity
• Contemplating the Spiritual in Contemporary Art
• Mat Collishaw Challenges Faith Perspectives With Ushaw Installation
• Waterloo Festival Launches At St. John’s Waterloo
• John Bellany Alan Davie Spiritual Joy and Magic
• RIFT Unites 17 Art and Science MA Graduates At Central St Martins
• Visionary Cities: Michael Takeo Magruder – British Library
• Van Gogh’s Religious Journey Around London
• William Congdon Holy Sites And The Kettle’s Yard Connection
• Mark Dean Premieres Pastiche Mass At Banqueting Hall Chelsea College of Arts
• John Kirby: The Torment Underlying The Civilised Facade
• Curating Spiritual Sensibilities In Changing Times
• Ken Currie: Protest Defeat And Victory
• Bosco Sodi: A Moment Of Genesis
• Bill Viola And The Art Of Contemplation
• Art In Churches 2018: Spiritual Combinations Explored
• Sister Wendy Beckett – A Reminiscence
• Guido Guidi: Per Strada Flowers Gallery London
• Peter Howson: The play is over – Flowers Gallery
• Camille Henrot: Scientific History And Creation Story Mash Up
• Nicola Green Explores Recent And Contemporary Religious Leaders – St Martin-in-the-Fields
• Art And The Consequences Of War Explored In Two Exhibitions
• Helaine Blumenfeld Translating Her Vision
• Sacred Noise: Explores Religion, Faith And Divinity
• Bill Viola: Quiet Contemplative Video Installation St Cuthbert’s Church Edinburgh
• The ground-breaking work of Sister Corita Kent
• Picasso To Souza: The Crucifixion Imagery Rarely Exhibited
• Michael Takeo Magruder: De / coding the Apocalypse – Panacea Museum
• Giorgio Griffa: The Golden Ratio And Inexplicable Knowledge
• Arabella Dorman Unveils New Installation At St James Church Piccadilly
• Can Art Transform Society?
• Art Awakening Humanity Conference Report
• Central St Martins in the Fields Design Then And Now
• The Sacramental And Liturgical Nature Of Conceptual Art
• Polish Art In Britain Centenary Marked At London’s Ben Uri Gallery
• Refugee Artists Learning from The Lives Of Others
• The Religious Impulses Of Robert Rauschenberg
• The Christian Science Connection Within The British Modern Art Movement
• Artists Rebranding The Christmas Tree Tradition
• Art Impacted - A Radical Response To Radicalisation
• The Art of St Martin-in-the-Fields and
• Was Caravaggio A Good Christian?

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Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Question Of Faith.

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.

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.