New Baptist Kidd on the Blog

Where shall I start? – in this instance, not an easy question to answer.

I shall start with the description of an experience, develop a reflection out of and around it, and conclude with some more technical connections into the archives of Christian traditions.

It was during my stay at St Bueno’s, exploring in a new way what it might mean to speak of ‘Christ in me’ that an old memory lurched back to mind. It had returned several times before through the intervening years; but now, once again, it returned with peculiar relevance. As I described the recollection in my journal a few weeks ago, it read like this:

“It was during my days as an undergraduate in King’s College, Cambridge – so that makes it 1971, thirty-five years ago. I specially remember it as the time when I was first coming into contact with a highly innovative charismatic prayer group, just beginning to meet in Cambridge, recently inspired through a contact with the work of David Watson in York. Heady days! All of which left me with a disturbed and disturbing sense of longing to experience the immediacy of the Holy Spirit in more powerful ways, as others at that time seemed to be doing.

On this particular day, I was the person appointed to read the Gospel at Evensong in King’s Chapel; something I did quite often, though always an inspiring and challenging thing to do. When I looked up the lection for the day, however, particularly given the preoccupation with my intensified search for the gifts of God, I was notably shocked to find I would be reading the dramatic words from Matthew 18:19 “… if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you …” – so I was already becoming alert to a heightened sense of drama.

Anyway, there I was, all togged up in gown and surplice, perhaps thirty seconds before leaving my seat to read at the lectern, when the stranger sitting next to me, without any words or acknowledgement passing between us, handed me a scrappy sheet of paper on which he had just penned some words. This is what he had written:

God in us
trust
trust
else
we’re
less
than
dust.

I felt a kind of shock wave run through me, convinced that something quite extraordinary was happening to me, though quite what I really had no idea. I read the lesson with unusual conviction, returned to my seat still shaking, and tried to concentrate on the remains of the liturgy. When it was complete, I waited until almost everyone else had left the chapel and then turned to the man, who showed no sign of rushing to leave, inquiring who he was, and how I should understand the significance of the paper he had shown me. In one sense the story he told is quite simple, just one more thread in the everyday passage of time and of things, but in another ...

He was a poet, from the United States, visiting Cambridge for one day and, overwhelmed by the beauty of King’s Chapel and the music of King’s Choir, had penned these few words – immediately wanting to show them to someone. That turned out to be me. By this stage, as we sat in the quietening Chapel, he could see how shaken I actually was, but he never allowed me space to intimate that he might in any way have been functioning for me like a messenger from God - though I have always suspected he felt an intimation of this in himself too. I invited him back to my rooms overlooking the river and the King’s bridge over the Cam, for coffee and conversation. What American tourist could refuse an offer like that! We chatted for a while, although, for some reason I now cannot fathom, I ended up with no record of who he was or how I might be in touch with him into the future – and soon he went on his way. I have never seen him again, but the words he showed me on that flimsy scrap of paper have remained scorched on my mind as if it were yesterday – and perhaps, all these years later, I begin to understand a little more what they could possibly be about.”

The whole event felt strange - even as it was happening. Inevitably it all became interwoven with my personal search for some kind of charismatic renewal. As an event, I have certainly never forgotten it, though I do not think I have ever really known how to make sense of its potential significance. Thirty-five years later it becomes significant again for two particlar reasons: first, it is associated for me with a time when ‘strange happenings’ seemed to pass my way with much more frequency than I then recall for most of the intervening years; and second, because the content of the message, that focus on ‘God in us’, now comes back on my agenda with fresh and insistent force.

In the last few months, seemingly without invitation, the frequency of ‘strange happenings’ has shot back up the scale. Like the event in King’s Chapel, none of them is strange in the sense that it is not susceptible to perfectly rational explanation; but all of them are strange ‘to me’, because that is how they strike me, and because they do seem to impact my own life and the lives of others in ways which matter more than run-of-the-mill. Just one illustration must suffice: there I was late one evening on Stockport Station a few weeks ago – very much deserted, and quite a hostile environment for the lone traveller. The only other person in sight was a young woman, and I recall thinking to myself that I needed to keep my distance from her, since a tall bearded stranger could easily present as intimidating at that time of night.

But as I bought my ticket at the machine, I realised that she had come right up and was standing immediately next to me. As I turned to look, she said something like, “I have a terrible headache; it has been an awful day at the hospital.” My first inclination was to look over my shoulder to see the person she was speaking to – but clearly it was me, and she was calling out for help. In retrospect, I can see that I was right about her more than normal vulnerability; my guess is that she had a modest level of learning disability – which, of course, is something I have thought about and worked with a great deal over the years. Well, it turned out we were heading the same way, and I think it would be fair to say that I kind of ‘became her guardian angel’ for while, until finally I said good night to her, still on the train, got off and headed home. It could happen to anyone, any evening, yes; but it happened to me, that particular day, and it had a quality of strangeness, which makes me think again about God at work ‘in me’, ‘in us’.

Which, of course, brings me back to the content of the poem(?), and the phrase ‘God in us’ – without which there not a lot to write home about but dust. I am beginning to develop a new way of feeling for what this might mean – or perhaps better the equivalent phrase ‘Christ in us’. ‘Christ in me’ seems to be quite a good description of this fresh opening up I have been experiencing in my life through recent days. Thomas Merton is in no doubt that it is ‘Christ in me’ and ‘Christ in us’ which is the key to almost everything of significance in spiritual experience.

I suppose I find myself both drawn to and hesitant about the idea of Christ being, in some literal sense, in me. Positively, it offers a convincing, really quite thrilling, framework for understanding the energetic, almost resurrection explosion I have been experiencing within myself. Negatively, however, I hesitate at the apparent exclusivism of its seemingly closed Christian explanation of things. Perhaps another of my own poems from a few weeks ago can offer a way through and beyond this discomfort. I titled it ‘God in us’, and it reads like this:

GOD IN US

Christ,
God giving Godself in the world.

God giving Godself
in bud and leaf-burst
in all people and everywhere.

God giving Godself in me.

God giving Godself
in Confusius, in the Buddha, in Mohamed

and for me, I do confess,
quite amazingly in Jesus.
_____

I am choosing here a very particular way of understanding Christ, or better perhaps ‘Christness’, through the dynamic concept of ‘God giving Godself’. And I am recognising that such giving can take a multitude of forms and expressions. (One friend of mine repeatedly comes out with the line, ‘There has to be more to Christness than Jesus’ – and I now begin to get more of a handle on what he might be meaning.) Without wanting to buy too strongly into some kind of Rahnerian model of the ‘anonymous Christian’, I am wanting to say that the thing I am knowing through my encounter with the person of Jesus is exactly the same thing that others also find in measure by other means – but I am in no doubt that Jesus is the one who has made it happen for me, and I want to confess his importance to me, as clearly and as coherently as I can.

I have found myself renewed in my commitment to what I suspect properly belongs under the heading of evangelism – a word I have shied way from for a number of years. But this kind of evangelism has a very unforced, quite natural mode of expression. Intellectually it relies on the conviction that ‘Christness’, God giving Godself, is a reality in all human beings everywhere, a kind of pre-condition of their very humanity. That is a widely documented theological strategy to which I have also subscribed for some years – it is most certainly in the Roman Catholic theology of Karl Rahner, to whom I alluded earlier, but it is also in the writings of many recent and contemporary Protestants too.

So could these ‘strange happenings’, which have the texture of evangelism, be described as the ‘Christ in me’, as it were, signalling to the ‘Christ is others’?

Let me explain. If I take the example of the girl on the station, she, in her frail and rather broken humanity, was that evening specially open for ‘Christ in her’ to surface through the prompting of her particular movements and words. (This is a quality I have long associated with people who have significant learning disabilities, actually a quality which more able folk like me have typically closed down in ourselves with our excessive of self-confidence and self-assurance.) On the same evening, my guess is that my own more-than-usual heightened openness to Christ, meant that the ‘Christ in me’ could, as it were, call out to the ‘Christ in her’ and a ‘strange happening’ was free to take place.

Well … I merely offer it as a narrative which might illuminate some of the stranger things that happen to us. I works quite well in accounting for a number of things I am struggling to understand. It accounts, for example, for this renewed increase of frequency in ‘strange happenings’ in my own life. And thinking back to 1971, poets are, by trade, dedicated exponents of openness, so it is not at all surprising that a poet could be someone intuitively open to this signalling between persons, which would account at least in part for the striking juxtaposition of certain dimensions in the King’s Chapel event. And it also accounts for the new wave of ‘evangelistic’ encounters which seem to be becoming more a part of my life – in shops, and bus queues, and ‘chance’ encounters with all kinds of folk.

Lastly, then, it has all taken me back to think again about a very specific theological conundrum I wrestled with in the theological biography of the early twentieth century protestant theologian, Paul Tillich – who I studied at length some years ago. Tillich, like many others, became quite convinced early in his theological pilgrimage that, as he would say about the narrative I have offered above, all theological language is ‘symbolic’ – that was his word, today others might say ‘metaphorical’ and mean much the same. But he never rested comfortably with this conviction, and explored in a number of his writings whether perhaps there is at least one non-symbolic (or non-metaphorical) statement lurking somewhere in the background – a statement which would enable, as he once wrote, ‘the whole theological edifice to have a leg to stand on.’ At one time he toyed with the statement, ‘All theological statements are necessarily symbolic’ as the possible leg – the one non-symbolic statement – but its claim on him could not be sustained, and my understanding is that he ended his life with the conviction that no such statement is to be found.

I now think I can see more clearly what was going on in Tillich’s quest. I share with him the desire for a leg on which the whole theological edifice can find a perch – without one I will struggle to find sufficient confidence in my faith convictions to dare the boldness of evangelism. But I wonder if Tillich’s error was the fact that he repeatedly looked for a ‘conceptual’ statement to break through the impasse. Surely this was always doomed to fail, because every conceptualisation is bound to be susceptible to precisely the same symbolic analysis. The ‘leg’, the non-symbolic, the non-metaphorical, can never be more than what Karl Rahner and many other contemporaries, speak of in terms of the pre-conceptual, some immediately given horizon (David Tracy’s phrase) which is the possibility of all genuinely credible knowledge. That it is pre-conceptual is not to question its reality or its crucial importance, but merely to question its epistemological standing. This pre-conceptual givenness, this horizon, is what I think I am calling ‘Christness’, God giving Godself to us. It is ‘Christ in me’, the immediate (non-conceptual) encounter, the most real encounter I shall ever have, which is the ultimate hope of salvation, mine and others.

Now I studied all this, and wrote about it at length in working for my doctorate back in the 1980s – but I think I have come to understand it for the first time with any real force over the course of the last few months. ‘Christ in me’ really is the key – to life, to faith, to salvation, to evangelism – you name it, and ‘Christ in me’ gets in there with notable significance.

I shall clearly be wanting to write about this again from other angles. If you have struggled with the latter paragraphs, just go back and enjoy the stories nearer the beginning – but I would like to think that the whole piece is worth further, perhaps hard, reflection.

As I begin to think about returning to work at the end of this sabbatical on 1st September, I am intensely aware that the first sermon I shall preach will be on the 30th anniversary of my own Ordination, on the first weekend of September 1976. One of the promises I made on that day was ‘to do the work of an evangelist’. I would like to think that as I work away at the renewal of those promises on the coming anniversary Sunday, that particular promise will be made with heightened intent.

Many of the themes I have been exploring in recent weeks impact deeply on how I feel about the education processes we have adopted, so uncritically, in the western world, and these will certainly have a significant influence on the way my own teaching continues to develop in the future.

It was my prayer guide at St Bueno’s who first pointed me to the spiritual poetry of the Hindu mystic, Rabindranath Tagore, and especially to one of the first collections of his poems to be published in Britain under the title ‘Gitanjali’. Her inclination that they would resonate with the way my own mind and heart had been developing was exactly right; but, for me, the first delight was simply to read the ‘Introduction’ to the 1912 edition, written by the Irish poet W B Yates. In it, Yeats contrasts his own experience of survival as a poet in the western world, with its obsessive attachment to literary criticism and writing of critical reviews, with what he perceives to be the incomparably free eastern experience of the young Tagore. “We have to do so much (criticism), especially in my own country, that our minds gradually cease to be creative, and yet we cannot help it. If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers. Four–fifths of our energy is spent in the quarrel with bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others”, writes Yeats. But, in contrast, of Tagore he writes, “These lyrics – which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention – display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble.”

The Introduction, though brief, is well worth reading in full – and, of course, the poems are a total delight. As a taster, how about this little piece (No 43), which harks back to some of the ideas I was exploring around ‘memory’ a couple of days ago – but with such simplicity and such beauty.

“The day was when I did not keep myself in readiness for thee; and entering my heart unbidden even as one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king, thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment of my life.

And today when by chance I light upon them and see thy signature, I find they have lain scattered in the dust mixed with memory of joys and sorrows of my trivial days forgotten.

Thou didst not turn in contempt from my childish play among dust, and the steps that I heard in my playroom are the same that are echoed from star to star.”

Which connects in multiple ways with one of the memories which flooded back into my own mind during the days of silence at St Bueno’s. When it first came, I wrote about it like this:

“I must have been six years old; I was is Miss Eade’s class, but she was ill and away, and Miss Walker, the fearsome head teacher, was looking after us for the day – I was very scared of her. She asked us some question about nature which demanded the naming of animals, and I shouted out excitedly ‘a bunny’. “Richard” she said, in that hard very stern voice “that is what little children call them, you are older now and you must call them rabbits!” Is that what our educational culture does for us; and it has taken fifty years to the year to become as a little child again?”

So, as you might guess, I have become very much renewed in my attachment to bunnies. In fact, I seem to be finding them everywhere. Running one morning on the hill above St Bueno’s (see picture), I turned a corner only to find myself face to face with one - so to speak. “Hello bunny!” I cried out defiantly; and the terror of Miss Walker was banished; I was free at last!

All of which, it seems to me, is archetypical of what we do to an enormous number of people with our western forms of education. Much of the worst damage, it seems, is frequently done around the age of six, very much a watershed - and I have other memories from that period of life I shall want to share on other occasions.

In conclusion, however, I want to state, as clearly as I am able, that I am not against critical thought. I am not in any way losing my love for, or my desire to teach and inspire others with much of the deliciously rich fruit to be picked from the European history of ideas – but not at any price! There is a proper holism about human thinking in every way parallel to the proper holism of all human being.

Returning to Tagore, I need the freedom of the learned and unlearned metaphor. I need the freedom of a highly trained mind and also of liberated emotion. But what I need more than anything else is bunnies – and not merely rabbits!

There are several reasons why I elected to go to St Bueno’s in the silence of the welsh hills as the place for my recent retreat, but one stands out more clearly than any other. I have long been totally smitten with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins – much of whose early work was conceived whilst living at St Bueno’s from 1874 to 1877.

For more than thirty years, when it has come to choosing which books I will take with me on travels around the world - my literary comforters - it has been Hopkins ‘Complete Poems’ which has won hands down (though Walt Whitman, T S Elliot and more recently R S Thomas have become hot contenders – yes, OK, and about twenty others!).

One Hopkins poem which I committed to heart back in the late 1970s has been an especially important companion. It is entitled ‘Heaven Haven’ and reads as follows:

HEAVEN-HAVEN
A nun takes the veil

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
______

As I write it, I easily relish the beauty of it all over again. Over the years I have felt it speak into my experience on a variety of occasions: sometimes interpreting what I have been feeling at a particular moment, sometimes opening up aspirations for futures as yet unformed - and it has done both these things exceedingly well. But in the last few months, I have found myself reading it an entirely different way from ever before – which transforms its potential significance both as interpreter and inspirer of my life in the future.

It seems odd now that I should have read it over so many years essentially as an invitation to retreat – in the sense of ‘retreat from’ the hurly-burly of daily life into the shelter of a monastic house, literally ‘out of the swing of the sea’. It had taught me to think of a potential calling to contemplative prayer primarily in terms of withdrawal, escape from the torment of the world’s unrest, into a peaceful place, where ‘storms’ never even get a look in.

But for a number of reasons, probably beginning with a prompt from Thomas Merton, and beginning to see Hopkins through the wider lens of his extended writings, I come to see the contemplative possibility in an entirely fresh light; not escape at all, but actually an energetic resource for engagement of the most robust kind – as Merton demonstrated in his extraordinary dialectic of monastic devotion and extreme political activism.

It is not at all difficult to manage a reading of the manifesto set out in the first stanza in this way. It can easily be read as an invitation, not to an external place of escape, the monastic cell, but as retreat into an essentially internal haven of peace through the inner life, a truly deep peace. This, by way of contrast, is a haven which does not rely on the shelter of a monastery at all; it can travel wherever a disciple is called to go. It can refer to a deep inner peace which ‘passes all understanding’ and which nothing has power to disturb. This is what contemplatives seek through the achievement of profound inner stillness and, as Merton writes, can be achieved even in the presence of any kind of external noise.

But what of the second stanza? Surely this cannot be forced to surrender a similar interpretation? Surely it does contain a request akin to ‘get me to a nunnery!’, “… to be … out of the swing of the sea”? Well, not necessarily. Try this – the request is again for inner peace where, even if storms are all around, they are unable to break in. Such inner peace is like the ‘green swell’ of leaf burst in spring which rises up out of a depth and can become the energy of true stillness; and the green swell actually rises up ‘in the havens dumb’, the still centre, and ‘out of the swing of the sea’, not in the sense of ‘external to it’, but rather, energised by its very movement, literally 'out from within it'. The request in the second stanza then becomes like that in the first – to know a deep inner peace in the midst of any and every external turmoil. It becomes a possible basis around which to live a life of total stillness and total engagement - simultaneously.

Now it might just be that every other reader has read it this way all along – but I for one never saw it! The result has been that this poem, wonderful as it has been, has falsely fed my instinct to seek tranquillity by escape; indeed, I thought that was what I was searching out through ‘elected silence’ at St Bueno’s. Whereas the truth of it has become the possibility of something very different – the discovery of peace, yes; stillness, yes; but stillness which might never need a place like St Bueno’s again. It has begun to build ‘a mobile peace’ which can travel with me to the ends of the earth, with the possibility of enduring all things and surviving all things.

I am glad to have this new reading, because this is the kind of peace I now realise I deeply want.

Several comments have come in regretting that the picture posted yesterday was only a thumbnail. I am still learning to use this site, but am about to try uploading a larger version. We shall see what happens.

Several times in my journal over the last three months I have written something like this: “I would never have thought it possible – thirty seven years after first experiencing the overwhelming impact of Christian conversion on my life, that God should pass this way again, and with such intensity.”

But that must only be the start of it – if some further ‘being converted’ is to be of any real significance it must bear fruit in active discipleship, discipleship which makes a difference for others and not just for myself. And I need to find words with which to describe it – both to myself and to others - for one clear component of my Baptist identity is a strong sense of calling to testify to the hope that is in me – I am called to be a witness to whatever it is I have seen and touched and heard.

So, I keep searching for the words with which to tell it. And one of the best attempts so far to make an inroad into the process of telling has entailed the exploration of three metaphors. Let me try them again here.

The first originates with a phrase from Thomas Merton’s ‘Seeds of Contemplation’ – Merton has been and continues to be a major source of inspiration for me at this time. The phrase is this, “… the metaphorical apex of existence”. Merton compares it to a tiny hole, hidden deep in the heart of our humanity, a tiny tiny point of entry through which we must pass if we are to find our true selves, and God. The metaphor grabs me because I think I have had a little peek through the hole, and maybe even a short excursion into the region beyond – and I like what I find; it certainly fuels my desire for God. It is, as Merton expounds at great length and in many different ways, one possible fruit of contemplative prayer, and it is probably the only really significant path to fulfilment in human life.

The second metaphor originates in the book which takes the same phrase for its title, the second in the Phillip Pulman trilogy, ‘The Subtle Knife’. I have recently completed all three volumes. At times I found them frustrating, occasionally a little irritating – I suppose when I felt he was being critical of something I love, especially when I also felt that he had not really understood – but most often I found them very illuminating. The ‘subtle knife’, which is used by the boy, and the ‘alethiometer’, which is used by the girl, have something in common, which I find spiritually extraordinarily perceptive. To use either of them effectively, the knife to open windows (the tiny hole?) onto other worlds and the alethiometer to gain a hold on truths otherwise beyond the user’s reach, requires a very particular kind of skill – which I also recognise from my tenuous excursions into contemplative prayer. Using the knife as the primary illustration – when the boy, crucially one who is ‘called’ to be the knife-bearer, first receives instruction from its previous holder, he is instructed to focus his mind right down to its very tip, to the fine point at the end, where the work of opening will be done. But, at first, this proves in no way to be effective. So then he is told to relax, to try less hard, to ride as it were the very fine line between doing and not doing, between active achieving and passive receiving. Yes, it is his mind, focused to a sharpness which will open to windows, but also (simultaneously?) not his mind at all, for ultimately it can only be the work of the one who has called the bearer in the first place. Aha, you say, the fine balance between effort and grace – as in prayer, on the one hand a disciplined activity, on the other a work of God’s Spirit within us. Yes, I bring my mind to it, but my mind alone remains a blunt instrument; only caught up by grace does it become potent for the moving of mountains.

Third, I have long been fascinated by the metaphor of the dream. And I find myself recalling a sermon I once preached at Sion Baptist Church in Burnley – occasionally people still quote it back at me, so I guess it must have been one of the better ones. In the sermon I begin to tell a story, an attention-grabbing story, seemingly drawn from my own experience. Only after a while does it suddenly become apparent that the story is actually the record of a dream! In the reflection that follows, my point is that though the form and content of the narrative are now exposed to be dream – still the dream remains real, I really dreamt it, and the fact of dreaming it can never be taken away. Sometimes over the last weeks I have been unable to avoid the thought that I might be ‘dreaming up’ this fresh encounter with Christ, that I have in some way ‘made it all up’, and that I shall wake up to my old self and find that nothing whatsoever has changed. Well, I increasingly feel that this is much more than a dream, but this metaphor brings me comfort, for even if my experience turns out to have dream-like qualities, no one can take away from the reality that I dreamt it.

So, three metaphors, all I think pointing in a single direction. I am not claiming that they have the power of explanation, they simply provide a first inroad into giving account of the hope that is in me.

I had been thinking about creating a self portrait ever since visiting a special exhibition at the National Gallery in November last year, and had talked about its production, much to the intrigue of my Support Group, back in March. My inclination had been in the broad direction of realism, made more striking by unusual cropping of the image – perhaps little more than half a face with the emphasis on an eye, probably the left one. But it came to me, uninvited, and with remarkable force on Wednesday 12th April 2006. This is an edited version of what I wrote in my journal:

“I have seen my self portrait, and I have seen it so clearly I do not think I can possibly forget it, though I will sketch it soon anyway. It is just as my old art teacher, Mr Forster said, quoting a little girl, “You thinks … and then you draw round the thinks”. I will call it ‘Being Loved – a Self Portrait’.

I saw it as I sat briefly in the lounge at St Bueno’s, immediately before lunch. The light was bright and I closed my eyes, pressing my hands against my eyelids - and I saw it. It must be allowed to develop a little if it wants to, but I really do think I have it. I am already looking forward to showing it to my Support Group and playing with people with words like, “… and what do you see?”

It probably needs to be quite large, so that it is possible somewhat to fall into it. The outer figures (?) are a brighter green than the central one – like the first burst of spring, or a new leaf on an oak tree. The darker green is not sombre but has a certain weight to it, like the deep colour of an older pine tree. The red is brighter than my first sketch, like the fire of blood spilt; and I think it is brightest near the middle and darkens just a little round the margins, especially at the base. The grey of the heads is quite foggy and blurs away – quite a surprising colour really. The sense that the outer shapes are figures is communicated by a hint of buttock, a shoulder and the bowing of heads. The central shape is a figure because of the head (which, for some reason, is green) and the shape of the shoulders; it tapers a little to the base so it feels like a figure kneeling and facing the viewer. The spacing is crucial: the figures do not touch but they are intimate and ‘balanced’. I feel that there is probably the hint of a darker outline between the green and the red, and an even thinner suggestion of a second boundary of grey before the red. The darker line could be made by mixing the red and the green at the boundary, but I need to experiment with this. I have tried closing my eyes again a similar way, but they have gone – at least for now.

What is it all about? That has to be up to the viewer. But I have already felt my mother and my marriage partner (the two most significant women in my life) – or Christ and the Holy Spirit. I am in a womb, or a vaginal shape, still coming to birth, head not yet fully formed (no concepts!), and it is gloriously warm, with all the promise of spring as their greens inflame mine. And the balance is altogether quite iconic: some hint of three-ness, and warm hospitality, and a sense of movement, dance even, with and around each other.

I returned to the room where it happened soon after lunch, but I could not make it happen again in precisely the same way. I have, however, managed to learn two more things: the first is that the three shapes are an after image originating from the light of three perpendicular windows separated by stone tracings; the second is that I was wrong about the boundaries - the grey seeps down inside from the heads to form a very fine line along their backs, and then gives way to the darker outline I mentioned earlier. So - I think I’ve got it; certainly enough to go home and paint it! “

Now, several weeks later, I have just finished painting it - oil on canvas (24" by 18"). So - here it is:

No doubt it gets stronger with increasing age, but I have long felt that the concept of memory is enormously important within the whole construct of human life, and a crucial category within any credible process of theological reflection. Long ago now, this whole theme of memory opened up for me in the writings of those who take the label 'process theologians' - especially Norman Pittenger in his 'After Death: Life in God', but also almost anywhere that the formative ideas of A N Whitehead are explored and developed.

It has also been for me a very special attraction in the poetry of Craig Raine, beginning with one of his early collections entitled 'The Onion, Memory' (1978). The opening line of the poem with that title reads: 'Divorced, but friends again at last, we walk old ground together in bright blue uncomplicated weather' - yes, that is what I know in part and still continue to seek.

If I could have reserved a title for a book I can imagine writing it would be 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu' (In Search of Lost Time) - but Marcel Proust got there long ago, and who am I to compete. I have long been aware that the Proust was a book I wanted to read - I still vividly remember the enthusiasm of a gay friend, explaining how he had read it many times over. Being a slow reader, I looked on in amazement - it extends to six volumes!

But as part of the sabbatical I have started Volume 1, 'The Way by Swann's' in the Penguin translation - and I do not think I am about to be disappointed. In a flowing stream of prose the author begins to explore in minute detail seminal moments from early childhood, which still remain as powerful as ever to shape and transform the present. I think I know that experience. My guess is I shall be commenting on this book in more detail through the coming weeks as I make my way further in the novel(s).

My own first attempt to say something about memory took shape quite a few years ago (1996). I would not say it quite like this if I were writing today, but it was fun digging it out to look again. I titled it 'The Ulitmate Amnesia' and it turned out like this:

THE ULTIMATE AMNESIA

It is no small things for us
to remember;
not merely
the reget of
promise broken,
opportunity missed,
the pain of
grief revisited -
real though these are.

Much more,
each time a memory is re-collected
it is changed
forever, and in measure lost;
fused with fresh connections,
new interpretations,
which, when re-stored,
fade into that
eternal blur
which will become our final Now.

And God is the chief exemplification!
_____

No, that is not what I want to say today, either in style or content. I think I would find a more hopeful note than 'eternal blur', but it still says much that is important to me. (I am also a bit embarrassed by the rather unsubtle influence of Whitehead on the last line!) Most recently I have found myself reading my own fresh experience through lenses formed over more than half a century, and coming to identify just what the lenses are with much greater clarity than when first I looked through them. And it is very moving, so that I can gladly say, again with Craig Raine, 'It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry.'

At this early stage of learning to blog, I am still laying trails which I shall no doubt be re-visiting many time in days to come.

If I try to summarise what the last few months have meant to me, I struggle for words. But a few weeks ago I found a brief poetic form shaping in my mind, and I it says much of what I think I have been about. The title I gave it is 'Praying Blind', and it reads like this:

BLIND PRAYING

Creator with no limit
darkly the silence grows a skin
on which, Relief!
we feel your face.
_____

In my journal (8th April 2006) I noted something like this: I have begun to get a feel for what it means to deal with God as a dark and silent space, the non-conceptual or pre-conceptual given at the heart of all things. I have been working with the story of the man born blind in John 9, the image of incarnation as God taking skin (John 1), and the idea of Jesus as one who was seen and touched by the first disciples (1 John 1). Together, these have become immensely powerful. It is ironic (a frequent motif in the Gospels) that God had not been as real for many years as God now becomes when I begin to let go the desire to own God as a concept.

So why start blogging now? After all, I have been talking about doing so for a while. Well - this is a special time and this feels to be an auspicious moment.

I am seven weeks into a five month sabbatical and there is no doubt this has been a very special time. Since the beginning of March, nearly three months ago now, I have been moving into and through a period of very significant personal growth. The sabbatical has focused it, but I am glad to be able to note in myself that the process began some time before the sabbatical began - because, inevitably, it is easy to feel that the present experience of well-being might be no more than the glow of sabbatical freedom. I am convinced it goes deeper.

I have not been a regular writer of personal journals, but through April I felt compelled to record some of my very intense thoughts and experiences. As someone who has never greatly enjoyed writing, I shocked myself to find I had written over 50,000 words. Much of it documents my first ever experience of an eight day individually guided silent Ignatian retreat which I took at St Bueno's in North Wales (see picture). The words include: theological reflections, poems, memories, insights gained through fresh readings of scripture, experiences of prayer, etc, etc. But the desire to journal in that way has now died down and what I need is a new framework within which to record the process by which I now further process all this intensity, alongside the fresh resources I create as I read and reflect in the process of preparing documents for publication. Hence the blog.

So - over the coming weeks I shall be posting new reflections on the work I am doing day to day, and I shall be drawing back on resources gathered over the last few months. I hope there will be at least a few people out there who will want to share some of the journey with me, and I look forward to comments from others who find a resonance between their own experiences and mine.