Between: wisdom

Showing posts with label wisdom. Show all posts

Monday, 2 March 2026

Artlyst: Art Diary March 2026

For my March 2026 diary for Artlyst, I begin with several exhibitions and other events to visit this season. Lent is a season when churches often have a significant encounter with art. These include Southwark, Portsmouth and Winchester Cathedrals, St Mary’s Guildford, and Goldsmiths College. Exhibitions exploring the religious inspirations of artists, including Gwen John and Anna Ancher, can also be found at the National Museum Cardiff, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Compton Verney, and Grand Palais, Paris. Architectural inspirations can be found in exhibitions featuring John Piper, Antoni Gaudí, and Sir John Vanbrugh. I end with exhibitions exploring aspects of mental health, ordinary life, and our sources of wisdom at venues including Two Temple Place, Tache, and Centre for Contemporary Arts, Tashkent.

For more on Gwen John see here, here and here, on Sophie Hacker see here and here, on John Piper see here, on Antoni Gaudi see here and here, and on Neil Tye see here.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Robert Plant - Gospel Plough.

Wednesday, 11 February 2026

Proverbs that persuade or tease into Wisdom

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

The young King Solomon may have been around 20 when he became King and asked for wisdom instead of long life, riches, or the death of his enemies (1 Kings 2.10-12, 3.3-14). God was pleased with Solomon's request and personally answered his prayer. This has often been understood as being because Solomon did not ask for self-serving rewards.

1 Kings 4. 32-34 tells us that: “God gave Solomon wisdom—the deepest of understanding and the largest of hearts. There was nothing beyond him, nothing he couldn't handle. Solomon's wisdom outclassed the vaunted wisdom of wise men of the East, outshone the famous wisdom of Egypt. He was wiser than anyone—wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, wiser than Heman, wiser than Calcol and Darda the sons of Mahol. He became famous among all the surrounding nations. He created 3,000 proverbs; his songs added up to 1,005. He knew all about plants, from the huge cedar that grows in Lebanon to the tiny hyssop that grows in the cracks of a wall. He understood everything about animals and birds, reptiles and fish. Sent by kings from all over the earth who had heard of his reputation, people came from far and near to listen to the wisdom of Solomon.”

Solomon’s reputation rested not only on his own brilliance but also his patronage of learning and the arts. The Queen of Sheba, who visited him because of his reputation for wisdom (1 Kings 10), was just one of a stream of visitors who poured into Israel to hear him and put him to the test, and from whom he learned as well. He and his wise men culled the wisdom of the east, but incorporated nothing that was not in line with God’s standards.

Solomon is credited in the Bible with writing an entire book of Proverbs based on the wisdom that God gave him through his experience of life. The book of Proverbs begins by setting out what wisdom is for:

“These are the wise sayings of Solomon,
David's son, Israel's king—
Written down so we'll know how to live well and right,
to understand what life means and where it's going;
A manual for living,
for learning what's right and just and fair;
To teach the inexperienced the ropes
and give our young people a grasp on reality.
There's something here also for seasoned men and women,
still a thing or two for the experienced to learn—
Fresh wisdom to probe and penetrate,
the rhymes and reasons of wise men and women.”

Wisdom, in the Old Testament, tends to be the voice of reflection and experience, rather than of bare command or preaching. Through Wisdom, we are persuaded, even teased, into seeing a connection between God’s order in the world and his orders to human beings. That includes the absurdity or foolishness of going against the grain of God’s creation.

Proverbs gives us the key to wisdom. “Start with God,” it says, “the first step in learning is bowing down to God; only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning.” Or in other translations, “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”

The ‘fear of God’ is the starting point of Proverbs and the pivot of all Wisdom literature in the Bible. Secular philosophy tends to measure everything by human beings, and comes to doubt whether wisdom is to be found at all. But the Old Testament with this motto – ‘the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom’ – turns the world the right way up, with God at its head, his wisdom the creative and ordering principle that runs through every part; and human beings, disciplined and taught by that wisdom, finding life and fulfilment in his perfect will. Knowledge in its full sense is a relationship with God, dependent or revelation or wisdom and inseparable from character or discipline.

So how can be we best use the proverbs and wisdom that we are given in the Bible? It is important to bear in mind that proverbs are by nature generalisations. They state what is generally true, not invariably true. The writers do not deny that there are exceptions. But exceptions are not within the scope of proverbial sayings. For instance, Proverbs states that those who live by God’s standards will prosper in the world. This is generally the truth (and we have statistical evidence today about the health and general well-being of churchgoers to back this up). But it is not an ‘unconditional’ promise, as the example of Job and the life of Jesus clearly show us.

So, these proverbs are not a set of commands or laws that must be followed to the letter in order that we benefit from wisdom. Instead, they are given to persuade us or tease us into seeing a connection between God’s order in the world and his orders to human beings. The style of the proverbs is to provoke thought, getting under the skin by thrusts of wit, paradox, common sense, and teasing symbolism. They are a bit like the parables of Jesus, something to make us think about life rather than being a set of clear and simple instructions to follow.

As a result, it is good to digest or study them a few saying at a time, weighing one saying against another and getting an idea of the general teaching on a particular topic. One resource that I have which helps in doing this is a calendar which has a different proverb for each day together with a very brief relational reflection on that day’s proverb.

That brings me on to another aspect of Solomon’s proverbs, which is that they are for the whole of life. There is no separation of the public and private or the sacred and the secular when it comes to the proverbs and wisdom in the Bible. Proverbs applies the principles of God’s teaching to: relationships, home, work, justice, decisions, attitudes, reactions, everything we do and say and think.

Proverbs 1. 20-21 says:

“Wisdom goes out in the street and shouts.
At the town centre she makes her speech.
In the middle of the traffic she takes her stand.
At the busiest corner she calls out.”

This open proclamation, made above the noise of the market, shows that the offer of wisdom is for the person in the street, it is for the business of living. So, for the Bible’s wisdom to really make sense we have to take and use it in everyday life; to apply to our Monday to Saturday lives rather than keeping it bottled up on Sundays alone. As Amy Carmichael prayed, “Holy Spirit, think through me till your ideas are my ideas.”

(Use made of material from The Lion Handbook to the Bible)

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NEEDTOBREATHE - What I'm Here For.

Sunday, 5 October 2025

Faith as small as a mustard seed

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Gabriel’s Pitsea this morning:

Brother Lawrence was a member of the Carmelite Order in France during the 17th Century. He spent most of his life in the kitchen or mending shoes, but became a great spiritual guide. He saw God in the mundane tasks he carried out in the priory kitchen. Daily life for him was an ongoing conversation with God. He wrote: 'we need only to recognize God intimately present with us, to address ourselves to Him every moment.'

Brother Lawrence also said that ‘We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.' The Parable of the Mustard Seed is an illustration of this truth. In that brief parable a small action, the sowing of a small seed, leads to the growth of a large plant. Jesus says that, in a similar way, the kingdom of God has small beginnings but grows to become something much larger. In today’s passage (Luke 17:5-10), Jesus says we only need a small amount of faith – faith as small as a mustard seed – to accomplish great things, like moving a tree to the sea. As a result, we should, like Brother Lawrence says, in no wise despise small actions.

The phrase a ‘mustard seed’ has entered our language as a little idea that grows into something bigger and that is of course literally what happened with the Jesus movement itself. It was a relatively small grouping of obscure people that died when its founder, Jesus died, but which, following his resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost grew to become the largest religion in history and also within the world currently.

We also see this illustrated in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher. While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him. He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves. Long centuries have come and gone but all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that were ever built; all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life.

The Early Church reveals the same pattern to us. Paul writes to the Christians at Corinth and says, “think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.” He says in this letter that, in the eyes of the world, Christians are foolish and the message of the cross is foolish.

The same words could actually be applied to us: none of us are major intellectuals or academics; none of us have major influence or power in terms of work or politics; none of us, so far as I know, were born into the aristocracy. The reality is that wonderful as each of us are, we are not major players on the world stage and that makes us, in human terms, one among millions of other human beings around the world. When we think of ourselves in those terms it easy to see ourselves and what we do as being small and insignificant.

We may not like to think of ourselves as being foolish, as well as insignificant, but that is how Paul describes the Corinthian Christians from the perspective of those considered wise in their culture. It is no different today, Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that God is a “psychotic delinquent” invented by mad, deluded people and our faith in God is a “process of non-thinking,” “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.”

BUT what Jesus demonstrates through his life, death and resurrection and what Paul states in his letter to the Corinthians is that “the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.” The Message, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible, puts it like this:

“Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.”

So, the kingdom of God is a place of multiplication. The kingdom of God is a place of exponential growth. The kingdom of God is a place where the tiniest seed can become the biggest plant. The kingdom of God is where faith as small as a mustard seed can move a mountain. The kingdom of God is a place where a grain of yeast can make a whole batch of dough rise. The kingdom of God is a place where a child’s lunch can feed 5,000. The kingdom of God is a place where the salt of our behaviour can flavour the community in which we live. The kingdom of God is a place where the little we can offer can be used to the praise and glory of God.

Just as in the parable of the mustard seed, our small inputs can have a big effect and, just as with Jesus’ words about faith here, the influence that one person can have can move a mountain. We could respond to this by thinking what small thing can I do today that will have a big effect but the reality is that we are rarely able to accurately predict future effects. Instead, we can learn, like Brother Lawrence, to value small, mundane actions in the knowledge that, if well done for the love of God, these actions can have significantly larger impacts.

And, because we know of this process or pattern or plan of the small, the insignificant, the foolish, being used by God to achieve great change, we can trust that our lives also have meaning and significance as we put our faith into practice in small acts of compassion here and little words of witness there; at home, in church and in the community. We don’t know what God will cause to grow from these actions and words but we trust that they will take root and grow because that is the pattern that we, and Christians throughout Church history, have observed in practice. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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Randy Stonehill - Strong Hand Of Love.

Friday, 10 January 2025

Image: In the Face of Death: Damien Hirst and the Thrill of Mortality

Image Journal issue 123 is now available. This issue includes an essay I have written entitled 'In the Face of Death: Damien Hirst and the Thrill of Mortality':

"How we deal with death and what happens after, if anything, are among the central themes of the great religions, while how we live with the knowledge of that fate is one of the ethical conundrums we each face. Hirst’s work, therefore, has been ethically and religiously engaged from the get-go. In addition to his central focus on the inevitability of death, Hirst explores our efforts to prolong life, including the paradox that we kill other creatures as food in order to survive, the preservation and decay of bodies, death threats, and how we live in the light of our mortality."

The cover of Issue 123 features the work of Josh Tiessen, from a series of narrative, “hyper-surreal” paintings that explore the sources of wisdom, human and otherwise.

As the Image team put the winter issue together, they noticed several themes emerging. You’ll see candles, time-worn scraps of paper, and a set of images they think of as “Eden after the fall.” There are several gardens—some that are havens, others that reflect the world’s troubles—and marriage with all its beauties and difficulties, including sex, companionship, aging, and illness.

In her first editorial as editor in chief, Molly McCully Brown weaves these strands together. You’ll also find a surprisingly theological interview with a stand-up comedian, a documentary film about a dress made of nettles, a grandmother who is mysteriously knowledgeable about Cuban art history, and more.

For more of my writings on Damien Hirst, see my VCS exhibition entitled 'Fishers of People' and my Artlyst review of his 'Natural History' exhibition from 2022.

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Scott Stapp - Weight Of The World.

Thursday, 5 September 2024

Become fools so that you may become wise

Here's the sermon that I shared with our Mothers' Union branch members during their pre-TGM Eucharist at St Andrew's Wickford:

A wise person once said, “There is only one way to acquire wisdom. But when it comes to making a fool of yourself, you have your choice of thousands of different ways.” In our NT reading today ( 1 Corinthians 3.18-end), St Paul says “If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” So, what is the wisdom that we are to seek and how do we acquire it?

In his letter, Jesus’ brother James states, “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you” (1.5). Wisdom is a gift given by God that must be wholeheartedly sought and asked for. Once received, it must be relied upon to help one persevere, live a godly life, and have hope. More than just insight and good judgment, wisdom is “the endowment of heart and mind which is needed for the right conduct of life.” (http://www.galaxie.com/article/atj29-0-03)

James also helpfully distinguishes between Christian wisdom and that of the worldly-wise. The worldly-wise are full of selfish ambition, eager to get on, asserting their own rights. God reckons a person wise when s/he puts selfishness aside and shows disinterested concern for others. This kind of wisdom is seen in a person’s personality and behaviour – not in mere intellectual ability. Accordingly - and this is one of the main themes of James’ letter – genuine faith in Christ always spills over into the rest of life. It affects basic attitudes to yourself, other people, and life in general meaning that there should be no discrepancy between belief and action. (The Lion Handbook to the Bible)

Secular philosophy tends to measure everything by human beings, and comes to doubt whether wisdom is to be found at all. But the Old Testament with its motto – ‘the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom’ – turns the world the right way up, with God at its head, his wisdom the creative and ordering principle that runs through every part; and human beings, disciplined and taught by that wisdom, finding life and fulfilment in his perfect will. Knowledge in its full sense is a relationship with God, dependent on revelation or wisdom and inseparable from character or discipline.

Philosophy means the love of wisdom but we are not talking here about a detached, academic or ivory tower style love of wisdom; instead we are speaking of insights which come from hard graft, wisdom from experience tested in the fire. So, for the Bible’s wisdom to really make sense we have to take and use it in everyday life; to apply to our Monday to Saturday lives rather than keeping it bottled up on Sundays alone.

Wisdom comes as we make a habit of reflecting on daily life recognising that God is to be found there. As David Adam has written:

“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)

The second source of wisdom is Jesus himself. What is said of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is also said of Jesus in John 1. James Dunn puts it succinctly: "What pre-Christian Judaism said of Wisdom … Paul and the others say of Jesus. The role that Proverbs … ascribe to Wisdom, these earliest Christians ascribe to Jesus." (Christology in the Making)

‘The New Testament teaches a “wisdom Christology” in various passages, indicating that Jesus is the fulfilment of this portrait of wisdom (see 1 Corinthians 1:24, 30; Colossians 2:3). The connections between Proverbs 8 and John 1 are particularly important: Wisdom is “from the beginning” (8:23), as is the Word that is with God; wisdom is the agent of creation (8:27-31), as is the Word (John 1:3); wisdom is “begotten” by Yahweh (8:24), as is the Word (John 1:18).’ (Peter J. Leithart)

This means that ‘Christians seek and find all the things Wisdom offers in Christ.’ Wisdom makes plans and carries them out. Wisdom helps kings to govern and rulers to make good laws which bring honour and prosperity to their nations because they walk the way of righteousness and follow the paths of justice (Proverbs 8. 11 - 21). Jesus, the Wisdom of God, also enables all these things to happen.

‘Wisdom was [God’s] agent to create the world, and through Wisdom, kings establish boundaries and create worlds (cf. Ecclesiastes 2:1-11); and Jesus is the Wisdom of God who equips us to form our worlds after the pattern of God’s Word and to re-form the whole world after the pattern of His kingdom. Jesus as the Wisdom of God does not rescue us from responsibility for the world, but equips us to be [righteous leaders].’

So, we are called to become wise but not with the wisdom of the world. Instead, let us beg for knowledge and plead for insight of God. Let us look for it as hard as we would for silver or some hidden treasure. If we do, we will know what it means to fear the Lord and we will succeed in learning about God because it is the Lord who gives wisdom; from him come knowledge and understanding. May it be so for us too. Amen.

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Iona - Wisdom.

Sunday, 4 February 2024

The creative, defining, loving Word of God

Today was the second ecumenical exchange that has been organised recently between St Andrew's Wickford and Christ Church Wickford with Revd Moses Agyam and I taking each others services. Revd Moses led the All-age Eucharist at St Andrew's I led the 10.30 am service at Christ Church (see below).

Here's the sermon that I preached at Christ Church:

Abracadabra, Open Sesame. If you’ve hired a children’s entertainer who did magic then you’re likely to have heard those words recently. They’ve been reduced to fun phrases for children but they represent our long-term belief in the power of words. If you’ve watched the climax of the BBC TV drama Merlin, then you’ll have seen Merlin, Morgana and Mordred muttering spells in an ancient tongue before their eyes flash and magic occurs.

Words have power. That’s what human beings believed in the past. We tend now to associate that thought with fantasy and yet it is an indication of the huge power that words actually carry. Each of us each day of our lives use words to make things happen and, while it may not be magic, it is powerful nonetheless.

The Bible teaches us much about the power of speech. Words are creative. In the beginning, God spoke the universe into being. God said, ‘Let there be …’ and life itself came into existence. Words also describe and define what has been made. In the Genesis account of creation, God divides light from dark and names light as ‘Day’ and dark as ‘Night’. Similarly he separates land from water and names the land as ‘Earth’ and the water as ‘Sea’. One of the first things he teaches human beings to do is to name what they see around them.

The creative, defining speech of God is wise. In Proverbs 8 we are told that God created Wisdom as the first of his works and that Wisdom speaks excellent words. God’s words, we are told, always accomplish what he purposes. When he sends them out into the world they never return to him void.

Yet, as Simon Small reminds us in his book ‘From the Bottom of the Pond’: “Thoughts and words are merely descriptions of reality. They can be wonderful, beautiful pointers to truth; they can evoke the experience of truth; and they can mirror the light of truth. Thoughts and words are necessary to help us open to the experience of truth. But they can never be truth itself. Thoughts and words, at best, can only be alarm clocks that wake us up to what was always present.” Words can be helpful or unhelpful, but they are not ultimately the reality or truth which they describe.

In the Prologue to John’s Gospel (John 1. 1 – 14), Jesus is described as being God’s Word to human beings; he is in himself the message that God wants to communicate to us. This Word is a real person, not simply a description of God or a statement of the truth about God. What this means is that the truth about God is found in a relationship with Jesus and not in a set of statements or beliefs about him. Truth is not a prescription that we can swallow but a relationship in which we live.

When Jesus is described to us in the Prologue to John’s Gospel as being the Word of God, we can see then that John is bringing all these thoughts about speech and words into play. When he writes that Jesus is God’s Word, he means that Jesus is the creativity, the definition and the wisdom of God; all wrapped up and revealed in human form and flesh.

Jesus’ creativity is seen in the new way of being human that he reveals to us. In him, the divine and the human come together enabling us to see all that human beings can potentially be; all that we can potentially become. In him we see the best of humanity because in him we see God fully expressed. The Prologue to John’s Gospel says that: “No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is the same as God and is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”

God is love and, in Jesus, we see pure love expressed without reserve and without self-seeking: the way of compassion instead of the way of domination; the way of self-sacrifice instead of the way of selfishness; the way of powerlessness instead of the way of power; and the way of giving instead of the way of grasping.

Therefore to follow in his way is to experience divinity in our lives; to move towards the divine. When we see him call his disciples to follow him that is what occurs; they leave their old way of life behind in order to begin to experience a new and divine way of being human. As the Prologue to John’s Gospel puts it, God himself becomes their Father.

In doing so, he is also the Word of God which describes and defines us. The Prologue to John’s Gospel explains Jesus’ ability to define us in terms of light and darkness. Elsewhere in John’s Gospel Jesus says to Nicodemus (John 3. 19 - 21): “This is how the judgement works: the light has come into the world, but people love the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds are evil. Those who do evil things hate the light and will not come to the light, because they do not want their evil deeds to be shown up. But those who do what is true come to the light in order that the light may show that what they did was in obedience to God.”

In other words, the light of Christ is all about comparisons and transparency. Jesus, through his life and death, shows us the depth of love of which human beings are really capable and, on the basis of that comparison, we come up well short and are in real need of change. In the light of Jesus’ self-sacrifice, we see our inherent selfishness and recognise our need for change.

The light of Christ is also about transparency. God sees all and Jesus, in his ministry, was able to shine a light on the deepest recesses of the human heart. The Samaritan woman said of him: “Come see the man who told me everything I have ever done” (John 4. 29). With Jesus, nothing is hidden, everything is transparent; therefore we need to change if we are to truly live in the light of his presence.

In 1 John 5. 20 we read that “the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we know the true God.” He is, therefore, also the wise Word of God because, through him, we understand and know the true God as he truly is. Not only that but we see and know ourselves realistically as well.

Ultimately, the Word that God speaks to us in and through Jesus is ‘Love’. In 1 John 4. 9 – 10 we read, “God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven.”

Jesus came into our world as the Word of God to live a life of self-sacrificial love as a human being. He shows us what true love looks like and he shows us that human beings are capable of true love even when most of the evidence around us seems to point towards the opposite conclusion. But he did not come solely as an example or a description of love. He is love itself, the reality of love, and, therefore, as we come into relationship with him we come into a true relationship with love. This why he came, that we might receive him; that we might receive love. He is then in us and in him. Love in us and we in love.

In the beginning Love already existed; Love was with God, and Love was God. From the very beginning Love was with God. Through him God made all things; not one thing in all creation was made without him. Love was the source of life, and this life brought light to people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.

“God is love. And God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven.

Dear friends, if this is how God loved us, then we should love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in union with us, and his love is made perfect in us. (1 John 4. 8 – 12).

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Parchment - Son Of God.

Saturday, 29 July 2023

ArtWay Visual Meditation - Gwen John: The Nun

My latest Visual Meditation for ArtWay is on the work of Gwen John, which can currently be seen at Pallant House in the exhibition Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris:

"The wisdom of quietude and purity which derives from paying prayerful attention is what we find expressed throughout John’s work and is the great gift that she offers to us."

My preview of Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris for Artlyst can be found here and my review of Reunited: Gwen John, Mere Poussepin and the Catholic Church for Art+Christianity can be found here. See also 20th Century Women Artists Challenging Conventions In Britain here.

My visual meditations for ArtWay include work by María Inés Aguirre, Giampaolo Babetto, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Alexander de Cadenet, Christopher Clack, Marlene Dumas, Terry Ffyffe, Jake Flood, Antoni Gaudi, Nicola Green, Maciej Hoffman, Lakwena Maciver, S. Billie Mandle, Giacomo Manzù, Sidney Nolan, Michael Pendry, Maurice Novarina, Regan O'Callaghan, Ana Maria Pacheco, John Piper, Nicola Ravenscroft, Albert Servaes, Henry Sh elton, Anna Sikorska, Alan Stewart, Jan Toorop, Andrew Vessey, Edmund de Waal and Sane Wadu.

My Church of the Month reports include: All Saints Parish Church, Tudeley, Aylesford Priory, Canterbury Cathedral, Chapel of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, Hem, Chelmsford Cathedral, Churches in Little Walsi ngham, Coventry Cathedral, Église de Saint-Paul à Grange-Canal, Eton College Chapel, Lumen, Metz Cathedral, Notre Dame du Léman, Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce, Plateau d’Assy,R omont, Sint Martinuskerk Latem, St Aidan of Lindisfarne, St Alban Romford, St. Andrew Bobola Polish RC Church, St. Margaret’s Church, Ditchling, and Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, St Mary the Virgin, Downe, St Michael and All Angels Berwick and St Pa ul Goodmayes, as well as earlier reports of visits to sites associated with Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Antoni Gaudi and Hen r i Matisse.

Blogs for ArtWay include: Congruity and controversy: exploring issues for contemporary commissions; Ervin Bossanyi: A vision for unity and harmony; Georges Rouault and André Girard: Crucifixion and Resurrection, Penitence and Life Anew; Photographing Religious Practice; Spirituality and/in Modern Art; and The Spirituality of the Artist-Clown.

Interviews for ArtWay include: Sophie Hacker, Peter Koenig and Belinda Scarlett. I also interviewed ArtWay founder Marleen Hengelaar Rookmaaker for Artlyst.

I have reviewed: Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace, Kempe: The Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe and Jazz, Blues, and Spirituals.

Other of my writings for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Church Times can be found here. Those for Artlyst are here and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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Sinead O'Connor - Take Me To Church.

Sunday, 7 November 2021

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.

Friday, 20 August 2021

Church Times: Proverbs of Micah Purnell, poster painter

iMy latest feature article for Church Times is an interview with artist and designer Micah Purnell:

'Text-based work is what gets his creative juices flowing, and that has a somewhat surprising source, which pre-dates his training in graphic design, advertising, visual art, and culture. He says that it “probably comes from the Wisdom literature in the Bible that I was exposed to as a teen and enjoyed reading growing up”.

His work involves “playing with words and editing it down and trying to be as succinct as possible”.

Looking at Proverbs, he was impressed by “how pithy and enlightening they are”.“A lot of the phrases that I find in Proverbs talk about the power of the spoken word,” he says, “how you can build people up or bring them down, such as Proverbs 15.1, ‘A gentle answer deflects anger, but harsh words make tempers flare.’”'

His work can currently be seen in Wembley Park's free art trail which consists of 14 pieces across a number of mediums, including paints, digital mixed media and upcycled materials. Underpinned by a sense of togetherness, diversity and hope, Micah's Against the Odds and Power in Unity were inspired by people uniting in tougher times to stand together for the greater good. A theme he has been looking over through 2020 and 2021, Micah sought to bring a positive and memorable experience to Wembley Park, creating an 'Ahhh' moment through the powerful design.

I have worked with Micah on a number of occasions over the past two years. See these articles and workshops at:

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here.

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Bruce Cockburn - All's Quiet On The Inner City Front.

Sunday, 15 August 2021

Essential wisdom

Here's the sermon I preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields this morning:

At age 21 Roger Cecil walked away from a scholarship at the Royal College of Art after just one week to ensure he focused on his artwork without being influenced by other students. Was he wise or was he foolish? His decision attracted the attention of the BBC who interviewed members of his family, community, and college for the 1964 film ‘A Quiet Rebel’. Most of those interviewed, for differing reasons, expressed confusion and disapprobation at Cecil’s decision.

At age 30 Jesus began his public ministry knowing it would lead him to Jerusalem and to crucifixion. He repeatedly told his disciples what would happen to him and resisted any attempt to dissuade him. Was he wise or was he foolish? His teaching on his task was either not understood by his disciples or actively resisted, so much so that at the point of his death his disciples either betrayed or denied him or ran away.

The young King Solomon may have been around 20 when he became King and asked for wisdom instead of long life, riches, or the death of his enemies (1 Kings 2.10-12, 3.3-14). He is understood to have been wise. God was pleased with Solomon's request and personally answered his prayer. This has often been understood as being because Solomon did not ask for self-serving rewards. However, there is something deeper happening here, something which connects the destinies of the three people with which I have begun. I hope that by reflecting on their stories we can come to understand what gaining wisdom might look like for us.

We can firstly understand Solomon to be wise already, as he recognised his own limitations as a young man and an even younger King so asked for God's help and wisdom in ruling well. He recognised that he was facing a huge task – ruling a people who were so many that they could not be counted – and that he didn’t have the life experience or knowledge to carry out the task – “I am very young and don't know how to rule.” Wisdom starts with a realistic assessment of the situation we find ourselves in. It is only once we have a realistic understanding of where our starting point is that we can begin to find ways forward. So, Solomon showed wisdom before he asked for and was given wisdom.

Secondly, we can also understand Solomon’s request in terms of something essential to good governance. When the people of Israel first asked for a King, God told them, through Samuel, who was both prophet and Judge, that their Kings would be self-serving by centralising land and wealth in the hands of a few. Later in scripture, after Solomon’s reign, we see that this came to pass, as the majority of those that followed Solomon as King did not possess his wisdom. Instead, they used their position and power to exploit others for their own personal gain. They oppressed and exploited their people in ways that were unjust and when they were then criticised by the prophets God sent to denounce them it was lack of justice that the prophets highlighted. Solomon rejected that temptation by asking for wisdom instead of self-serving rewards and, by doing so, identified that the essence of good governance is that the one with power and resources acts justly for the good of all the people, not simply the few.

Identifying the essence of the role we are to play or the vocation we have in life is key to this story and to the finding of wisdom. Solomon writes in the Book of Proverbs that wisdom was a co-worker with God in creation. When the world and its creatures were being shaped, formed, and defined, wisdom was beside God, making sure everything fitted, delighting in the world of things and creatures, happily celebrating the human family. (Proverbs 8. 30). We see this aspect of wisdom fleshed out in another of the creation stories of the people of Israel, a story about the wisdom of identifying essence. The Book of Genesis gives us the story of Adam, in partnership with God, naming the animals. Names in ancient cultures had power because they described the essence of what it was that had been named. So, in this story, Adam identified the essence of each creature that came before him in order to see and work with that creature’s place in the circle of life. In a similar way, Solomon had to identify the essence of being a monarch in order to understand the role he was to play for the people of Israel. That role was one of identifying justice, equity, and fairness for all. Solomon realised that wisdom involves working with God to identify essence and then working with the grain of that understanding.

Jesus came to a similar place as he explored the scriptures for himself as a child growing up in Nazareth. He identified scriptures about the role of the people of Israel as applying to himself, so that when he later read from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth, he could say that that scripture had been fulfilled in their presence that day. He understood that, through his people, God wished to demonstrate that he is with all people through death into life. Jesus saw that the essence of incarnation was to live that reality, so knew his path through life - crucifixion, resurrection, ascension - and would not be distracted from it.

While on holiday I saw a retrospective exhibition of Roger Cecil’s work, the final exhibition for the foreseeable future in a series organised by the artist’s estate following his death in 2015. Entitled ‘A Secret Artist’ the exhibition provided answers to the central secret held by Cecil and his art. At its heart was a secret love to which he was devoted; a love that combined home, Wales, and the landscape of Abertillery.

When interviewed in 1964 for the BBC film ‘A Quiet Rebel’, Cecil spoke of his worry that at the Royal College of Art each artist would become 'a bit of everybody', each influencing the other. He left and went home to 'do painting my way ... the way I feel it.' At 21 he knew the essence of his art was the landscape of Wales and that of his home in Abertillery in particular. For him, to have been separate from that source of inspiration would have diluted his art.

45 years on from walking out of the Royal College of Art and after a career in which he made the art he wanted in the way he wanted and still found access to galleries and sales, he said: ‘I am very lucky, because ... ninety-nine per cent of people, they don't know what they do, all their life. You imagine that. Terrible, isn't it! To think they go through life and they don't know what they do. Now, I'm lucky. I'm very fortunate. I knew from when I was about ten. I wanted to do art. And I've done it.'

Wisdom comes from knowing who we are and who or what others are in God. Remembering we are fearfully and wonderfully made by God in our mother's wombs and therefore have unique contributions to life only we can make through the particular combination of gifts and talents and personalities we have been given. Such wisdom is gained by understanding essence and working with it.

Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes about the importance of remembering your creator in the days of your youth, “before the days of trouble come … and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12.1&7). I think one understanding of that statement is about finding the wisdom of essence early on in life, as was the case for Solomon, Jesus and Roger Cecil. We are most likely to do so if, like Solomon, we recognise the limitations of youth and use that understanding as motivation to cry out for insight, seeking wisdom like silver, and searching for it as for hidden treasures (Proverbs 2.3&4).

However, Solomon’s statement was not primarily about coming to that understanding early in life but instead more about finding that wisdom before death comes to us, in the time that we have available to us. For many, perhaps most of us, that is the journey of a lifetime.

That has certainly been my own experience. My call to ordination came in my forties and involved the recognition that my interests and experience in church, the Arts, social action, and employment, could all come together and be blended within ordained ministry. Experiencing that blend within my ministry in East London meant that when, in my fifties, I saw the advert for the role I now have here at St Martin’s - which through the 4 Cs brings together congregation, culture, compassion and commerce – I could see that this was a role that fitted perfectly with my experience and interests and through which the essence of who I am in God could be expressed. It took more than half a lifetime to reach that point but that was not wasted time, rather essential preparation for recognising and relishing the role.

Finally, the urgency of Solomon’s statement is because identification of essence is essential wisdom. It is wisdom that leads us to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it. That was the great insight of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins; that the world is “news of God” and therefore “its end, its purpose, its purport, its meaning and its life and work is to name and praise” God.

How do God's creatures "give him glory"? Hopkins’ answer was “Merely by being themselves, by doing themselves”, by living out their essence. “Selfhood is not a static possession, but an activity:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves-goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.”[i]

All things, Hopkins wrote, “are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.”[ii] By being our essential selves Christ is revealed in us. Hopkins concluded:

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Hopkins claimed we are most Christ-like when we act as our essential selves because then we are most fully in touch with the person we were created to be. We have briefly considered how Solomon, Jesus and Roger Cecil each discerned their essence. Solomon considering his legacy as David’s son and as a child of God before then looking at the demands of the role he had to play. Jesus in searching the scriptures to understand the call on his life and Cecil realising his love for the landscape of his home before making that the essence of his art. What is it that characterises your life and loves? What is it that only you can do for God as a result? In searching for the answers to those questions, you will act in God’s eye what in God’s eye you are – Christ – and know wisdom, as Christ plays to the Father through the features of your face. Amen.

For more on essence see my Bread for the World reflection on 'Creativity and sacramental sight' by clicking here.

[i] The Creation of the Self in Gerard Manley Hopkins, J. Hillis Miller, ELH, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec., 1955), pp. 293-319
[ii] The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Leonard Cohen - Steer Your Way.