New Baptist Kidd on the Blog

It is a strange business – how, in one sense, we can ‘know about’ something for many years and yet, in another, not ‘know’ it at all. I have long been aware of ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, ‘The Blue Rider’ movement, and its radical artistic adventures in the early twentieth century. Individually, I have enjoyed many of the works of its main contributors: the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and, with less educated conviction, the artist-composer Arnold Shoenberg. Then, suddenly, I find these prophetic artists seeming to say everything I have ever wanted to say – although I have never known quite how.

Some background might be useful. Undoubtedly the visionary inspiration for ‘The Blue Rider’ came from Wasssily Kandinsky, although from the start it was an essentially collaborative venture, and would never have left the starting gate without the committed involvement of many other artists, mostly painters and musicians. The name was the title chosen by Kandinsky and Marc for the movement’s first and most famous publication, ‘The Blue Rider Almanac’ of 1912. This is a picture of the cover, an original design by Kandinsky for general use as a symbol of the movement:

The Almanac was a bibliographical expression of the rationale underlying a number of exhibitions staged under the same name. The movement was essentially eclectic - hence the unusual juxtaposition of painters and musicians. More than that, however, ‘The Blue Rider’ deliberately avoided identification with any one off-the-shelf artistic style – and this was the first feature forcibly to strike me in its potential to dialogue with more recent movements and ideas.

Kandinsky was clear in his conviction that rigid alignment to any single artistic style seals a death warrant on genuine creativity. He spells this out in considerable detail in his now famous treatise, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ – one of the few major texts out of the western world exclusively dedicated to a dialogue between art and spirituality. In it he suggests that, at any given moment of cultural history, there are rarely more than a few artistic pioneers who actually live on the leading edge, at the top of the artistic pyramid, as it were. These few are those who are able to cut themselves free from the shackles of all previous styles and schools of thought, and are genuinely able to ‘do a new thing’. They put down markers ahead of their time, and effectively create the possibility for new cultural futures. Contrastingly, the majority of artists, working within one or more already established styles might seem to create the new but, in reality, their work is no more than a fresh example of something that has already become dated and lifeless. They seem to put down markers too, but these are already behind the crest of the advancing cultural wave.

This is an fascinating model for understanding the continuing movement of artistic styles, and goes some way towards explaining one of those things which has remained a mystery to me for many years – precisely why it is that new artistic expressions generate such extreme vitriolic responses, not only in the public at large, but also in the more rarefied communities of the art establishment. It has happened over and over again with each new generation of artists; even though it is also well understood that the same works of art, pilloried in one generation, will almost certainly become the priceless and sought after treasures of the next. The pattern has been repeated generation after generation, though rarely with greater force than in the turbulent years around the turn of the twentieth century. I have written elsewhere (‘God and the Art of Seeing’) about the scathing reception given to Edvard Munch’s painting, ‘The Sick Child’, in Norway in the mid-1880s; and the venomous reception given to Monet’s now world famous images of water lilies and haystacks is now well-documented as one of the conundrums of art history.

I had already learned to recognise a familiar sociological motif at work in this phenomenon, the creation and preservation of a closed circle, an establishment – but Kandinsky, I think, offers a more subtle window of understanding. It is not just that the boundaries of the establishment and its club are threatened; more than that, genuine pioneers are doomed to be misunderstood, because they are actually thinking what up until then has remained literally unthinkable. Because what they are thinking has not previously been thought, there do not exist any readily accessible conceptual categories with which to facilitate its reception. (I am reminded here of Kuhn’s analysis of the way in which revolutions take place in models of scientific thinking, paradigm shifts as he calls them.) Cultural critics, exclusively drawing on categories derived from the past, simply do not have the apparatus with which to interpret and therefore appreciate the arrival of the genuinely new.

By commending freedom from commitment to any single artistic style (the Almanac brings together and affirms examples of works of art from many different eras and many different locations) Kandinsky is encouraging an attitude which is, at least, more likely to be able to embrace the genuinely new and to experiment freely beyond the boundaries of local fashion. Examples, peppering the Almanac, are described by Kandinsky as ‘the best’ from the leading edge in earlier specific times and places; his message is that their value deserves to be honoured, but that it would be foolishness to extol them as ‘the best’ for our own unique time and place. They did their pioneering work in their own time and place, but most of their creative potential is now exhausted. This is a very strong statement concerning the contextual nature of aesthetic values.

All of which fascinates me enormously when I begin to think about movements within religions, and the passionate commitments people make to religious and/or spiritual styles – past and present. I am reminded, for example, of the derisory anger which my own enthusiasm for the early charismatic movement in the 1970s generated amongst more traditional Baptists; and I am also reminded of my repeated discovery of ‘sects within sects’, dedicated groups of followers of this or that, still passionately committed to forms of believing which belong to moments in the Christian era now long dead. It makes me want to do a Kandinsky. I want to create a ‘spiritual almanac’ which affirms and commends a wide variety of spiritual resources from a great range of times and places. I want, for example, to commend and to enjoy the icons of early Christian centuries, to be moved by the wild and sometimes terrifying writings of so-called ‘desert fathers’, to benefit from the quiet reflectivity of contemplative mystics, men and women, throughout the centuries; I would even like to discover how to participate in the exuberance of contemporary pentecostal praise - and so on, and so on. The freedom to affirm and commend all these might then, in turn, free me to be able to recognise that as yet un-named somewhat, the special gift for this particular time and place, which I am in the gravest danger of overlooking whilst I remain too embroiled in a single style from the past. I might miss what Kandinsky described as the ‘spiritual in art’, and which today some Christian prophets might choose to describe as ‘what God’s Spirit is doing in our time’. All of which feels remarkably at home in the period we tend to label postmodern – as if we had really significantly moved on from early twentieth century. I am not so sure that we have.

In this ‘breaking with styles’, emphasised by the creators of the Almanac, something quite extraordinary was taking place. The overall direction of ‘The Blue Rider’ movement was clearly orientated towards an affirmation of ‘the abstract’ - something which had not consciously found favour in the cultural history of the west for more than a millennium. In this context, ‘the abstract’ must not to be heard in negative terms, a bid for all that is obscure and inaccessible to interpretation; rather, it should be heard as a massively positive bid to undermine the dominant post-Enlightenment paradigm with its sterile, and too often exclusive, commitment to analytical reason.

It is easiest to illustrate this from the work of Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg first met Kandinsky back in 1911 and each, it seems, immediately recognised in the other something which could draw them together in a single movement. Schoenberg was not entirely unknown as a painter, mainly of portraits, many of himself - though painting was never his strongest mode of artistic expression. He is best known for his experiments with ‘free’ or so-called atonal music – that is, with music which has freedom from the formal conventions in western harmonic traditions. In one of the Almanac’s short essays, by Kulbin, entitled ‘Free Music’, it is argued that, by breaking with the particularity of one harmonic tradition, music is merely re-claiming what has remained unscathed in ‘nature’ despite the development of human cultural history. “The music of nature is free in its choice of notes – light, thunder, the whistling of the wind, the rippling of water, the singing of birds. The nightingale sings not only the notes of contemporary music, but the notes of all the music it likes.” The remarkable thing is that a culture constrained by a very particular harmonic tradition should continue to extol the song of the nightingale as something of peculiar beauty. In commending atonal music, Kulbin enumerates many of the delights in store for the open-eared listener, singling out the distinctively new experiences generated by what he calls “… the close connection of tones and the processes of close connection.” I think it was these ‘close connections’ which, at first, I found most difficulty in appreciating; but with the passage of time, I now can find these quite extraordinarily moving.

In his own celebrated essay in the Almanac, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, Schoenberg himself goes on to argue that music must also resist every compulsion to be programmatic, to replicate, as it were, patterns already laid down in the other arts. So in setting words to music, Schoenberg deliberately refuses to conform to stereotypical assumptions. Traditionally musicians had often felt obliged to match words expressing urgency with rapid tempos, and words expressing restfulness with slow and sombre tones; rather, Schoenberg argues that music must be free to create its own forms of expression, breaking its slavish congruence with other media, and opening up fresh potential to complement and enlarge the possibilities for inspiration.

The reception of ‘free music’, of course, had all the hallmarks that I have already associated with the work of painters, and Schoenberg’s music was rubbished by most of his contemporary critics. The Almanac argues, not entirely surprisingly, that the professional cultural critic, already tied in allegiance to particular styles, is precisely the person who is least likely to be able to ‘hear’ the prophetic inspiration (Kandinsky’s ‘inner sound’) in new forms, be they visual or musical. The ear of the critic has been so ‘tuned’ to the styles of previous times, that there is now no way for ‘the new’ to be heard. As Kandinsky also put it, the critic is a theoretician, and the theoretician is a person capable of little more than discovering ‘mistakes’ in the genuinely ‘new’, however inspired this ‘new’ might be. The theoretician is structurally bound by the ‘rules’ of the past, and is disabled for doing other than negating that which is emerging in the present with genuine significance for the future.

I have no difficulty in relating all this to my own slow and sometimes reluctant journey towards an appreciation of ‘modern’ music. Today I value a measure of freedom to hear the previously unhearable, to be free to test everything for what it is, good or bad, riding as loose as possible to inherited conventions.

Everything Schoenberg affirms about music, Kandinsky parallels in his own crucial essay within the Almanac, ‘On the Question of Form’. Kandinsky is effectively declaring his own right to paint atonally, abstractly, playing the palette of colours and shapes with fresh freedom, expressing real moments of the human spirit which cannot be contained in any previous conventions of concerning form. Kandinsky claims this as the only way to release what he calls the ‘inner sound’.

Breaking the ‘rules’ of form is what, of course, the critics cannot bear. Franz Marc’s horses are the ‘wrong colours’; Schoenberg’s musical phraseology, in his ‘Herzgewächse’ (‘Heart’s Foliage’) for example, does not sufficiently correlate with verbal tones in the libretto. But that is the very point; in a fresh, although internally coherent way, the music provides the possibility of a new, equally valid, depth of insight as yet unheard in the history of music.

One fascinating conviction expressed in the Almanac, and shared by artist and musician alike, is that, in their new-found freedom, they are re-discovering things already known by the majority of children in their infancy, but strangled out of their artistic vocabulary by the processes of formal education – usually by the age of six! Kandinsky is ruthless on this point. He writes, “For every fire there is a cooling off. For every early bud – the threatening frost. For every young talent – an academy. These are not tragic words but a melancholy fact. The academy is the surest way of destroying the power of the child. Even the greatest, strongest talent is more or less retarded in this respect by the academy. Lesser talents perish by the hundreds. An academically trained person of average talent excels in learning practical meanings and losing the ability to hear his inner sound. He produces a ‘correct’ drawing that is dead.” Am I hearing a description of theological education trapped in that cul-de-sac generated at the pinnacle western liberalism? Even Kandinsky is not reluctant invoke the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament for support, pointing out Jesus’s specific allusion to the openness of children to God’s coming kingdom – the starting point for a very stimulating conversation concerning the relationship between artistic and religious forms.

From a religious perspective, I am fascinated by two powerful implications of the Almanac’s analysis of western culture. The first is simply this insight into the freedom of the child to ‘see’ and to ‘hear’ the truth, the prophetic word of God’s Spirit. This is something I have also found amongst people labelled as ‘learning disabled’ – and I find myself musing, as does Jean Vanier on the basis of massive experience by comparison with my own, just who it is in our culture that is disabled in their learning – by a lack or a surfeit of it.

The second runs a little further with this powerful affirmation of ‘the abstract’, peaking in the early twentieth century, and energised by a forceful rejection of the exclusive dominance of the analytical method – which, since the Enlightenment, had posed as the key to all significant truth claims. What ‘The Blue Rider’ group do with such skill is to expose this intellectual blind alley for the dead end it had always been. Whether we look at the playful coloured shapes of Kandinsky, or listen to the ear-stretching tonal games of Schoenberg, the common claim is that these artefacts are able to touch ‘depths’ in the human spirit, which have largely remained untouched by the dominant western cultural inheritance for many years. Tapping back into ‘natural’ forms and ‘primitive’ styles, largely untouched and certainly undervalued for many centuries, these artists speak into their own time and their own place with unique power.

One thing, of course, which they would not want us to do is to idolise their own heavily contextualised achievements in such a way that these too should become dampers on our own contemporary creativity. The invitation from ‘The Blue Rider’ is to ‘ride again’, and again, and again …

All of which, it seems to me, speaks volumes to any who are seeking to explore the potential of contemplative prayer – to which I so frequently return. As I have written in earlier blogs, a clear pre-requisite for such an exploration is liberation from the exclusivity of western obsession with ‘conceptual’ patterns of thought. Until it is possible to think again as a child, and to discover the role of the pre-conceptual and even the non-conceptual, in a fuller vocabulary of human knowing, God will not merely remain a mystery, God will remain a nonsense.

Once again I am reminded of a repeated caution in the writings of Thomas Merton. Merton reminds his readers over and over again not to become reliant on any one ‘mechanism’ of prayer or any one spiritual discipline. It is not that these disciplines are irrelevant - far from it they are essential equipment for the exploration; it is rather that they do not of themselves a guaranteed pathway to enlightenment or deeper insight. Insight only comes as a gift of God’s Spirit and, as such, will only come unsolicited, free from the constraints of any pre-determined conceptualisation (as free as the blowing of the wind, says Jesus in the Fourth Gospel). What we need, then, if we are to discover prayer that has contemplative depth, is a freedom akin to that affirmed in the birth of modern abstract art, which learned again old lessons about ways that deep truth is disclosed, revealed even. Rarely does fresh revelation depend exclusively on old forms, be they geometrical patterns, musical scales, or liturgical prayers. New wineskins will be in constant demand, as old ones will never be able to contain the ferment of the new wine.

I like all that – and could preach a pretty respectable Christian sermon on it too!

Just a little bibliography:
‘The Blue Rider Almanac’, first published 1912 (Tate Publishing 2006)
Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, first published 1911 (Dover Publications 1977)
‘Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider’, Scala Publishers, 2003

No, I have not become so ‘apophatic’ that I have finally disappeared into virtual silence – but I have struggled to give voice to this next blog. Sabbatical days continue to be highly creative, but I seem to have run against a writer’s block, and I am wrestling to start the flow again.

I have been exploring all manner of fascinating things, but a major focus has been the work of the painter, Mark Rothko, whose paintings first impacted my thinking many years ago. Rothko has frequently been adopted by those who feel the lure of the apophatic way, and my own judgment is that his paintings have immense potential as inspirations for contemplative prayer – though this is quite a change from my initial estimate of his spiritual significance.

When I wrote about Rothko’s work in a paper I prepared earlier this year, I introduced him like this:

“My first conscious, and extremely memorable, encounter with the paintings of Mark Rothko happened in the Liverpool Tate soon after my arrival in Manchester in late 1980s. Several things come to mind as I recall that occasion: I was bemused; I was also a little angry. Why would the Tate dedicate a whole room, a substantial portion of its special exhibition area to nine immense, seemingly empty canvases? Entitled the ‘Seagram’ murals, each one is nearly nine feet high and the largest is fifteen feet wide. They form nine vast areas of colour, typically in blacks and dark maroons? Originally painted in the 1950’s they were acquired by the Tate in 1970 and hung in a specially designed room, now relocated in the Tate Modern, closely following the painter’s precise instructions concerning both shape and light. Why was I angry? I suppose I thought they were a ‘waste of space’!

A ‘waste of space’ – now there’s an interesting concept, one that, since those dismissive days, I have come to think about in very different ways. I increasingly feel that this little phrase symbolises something really quite destructive, right at the heart of our western culture? Space – be it the area between buildings, the interludes between entertainments, the thorough-going silence when we hear nothing and we say nothing – has become, almost by definition, wasteful. And the Rothkos buy into such ‘wastefulness’ big-time. Not only the scale of the room they occupy, but the very idea of exhibiting huge areas of seemingly undifferentiated colour. Surely anyone could have wasted space like this? And to make it all the worse - the Tate actually paid for them, large sums of money!

There is, however, just the possibility that ‘space’ is the hidden treasure we most badly need, in return for which selling up almost everything else would be a small price to pay. And there is just the possibility that Rothko was making a profound and prophetic gesture, offering us a gift, something to which we do well to attend.

I have never forgotten that first immersion into the dark colours of the Rothko Room at the Liverpool Tate. The memory still has a haunting quality suggesting that something important was happening within me, even if I did not understand just what it was at the time. I have stood in that room several times since, now back in its London home. Each time it is a significant, if still bemusing, experience. So that, now, I have a strong urge to return and stand there again – and again – and again – each time, perhaps, with a little more understanding. And the anger is no more!”

I wrote those words – or some words very much like them - back in February and I have read and thought a good deal more about Rothko in the intervening months. Not only that, I have twice re-visited the Rothko Room in the Tate Modern and taken more time (or do I mean space?) than ever before to try and take it all in. Actually, on the first re-visit, I gave myself 100 minutes, during which I kept a running diary of how my experience unfolded – and, in retrospect, the account is really quite fascinating, if not a little scary.

Perhaps I should provide some more background before I offer my diary (and some accompanying pictures). The room in the Tate Modern is large and is entirely dedicated to Rothko’s murals. It has no windows and the lighting has been carefully regulated following the artist’s instructions. The pictures are so large that if you stand a short distance from them and allow your gaze to melt into them, you soon find yourself, as it were, passing through into the picture space – a space where all manner of unpredictable things can happen.

I am not alone in writing about experiences of Rothko in this way – though it soon becomes clear that not everyone experiences these pictures in the same way. The pictures capture people quite differently, and sometimes not at all – I was merely interested to see how and where they might take me. It had long seemed reasonable to me that they should have the possibility of becoming building blocks for a non-conceptual spiritual exploration precisely because they do not demand a pre-defined response from the viewer. What they offer is an open space, a visual silence, within which all manner of communication can happen in potentially surprising ways. I suspect that I can be numbered amongst more receptive viewers, but I am quietly confident that for many an open-minded viewer they could easily become an interesting and significant point of entry into the experience of contemplation – setting us free from the constraints of all those conceptual formulations which pretend to provide us with a shortcut to spiritual insight.

I reproduce here thumbnails of the nine pictures which fill the walls. I am only putting them up as thumbnails: partly because of copyright, and partly because anything less than full size does not do the capturing thing anyway – so, if this begins to grab you, there is no alternative but to take a trip to London.

Below is a small Word file with a map of the room, showing the layout of the murals. The numbering is my own and just a way to cross reference to the notes in my diary.

ROTHKO_ROOM_-_layout.doc

No1

No2


No3


No4


No5


No6


No7


No8


No9


One last pre-amble. I had heard others refer to the stirring sexual energy of these pictures, but had not at all anticipated quite how energetic they might be. I have actually felt quite inhibited about putting this little diary up on the blog – one reason for my writer’s block - because, no doubt, it says things about me as well as about the pictures. A month later, I think I just need to go for it; it was such a good experience I really would like to share it.

***************

My diary of the 100 minutes reads like this:

“I arrive at the Tate Modern around 3.30pm on Friday 12th May 2006, and head directly for the Rothko Room. My plan from the start has been to spend a significant amount of time there – though at the start I remain unsure just how long will be appropriate. In practice it becomes quite hard to make the decision to leave, which is why part way through I set myself a 100 minute limit. Although nearly two hours, my time there slips by almost unnoticed. I estimate, however, that during the same span, something like a thousand other people pass through the room, most staying for no more than a minute, and only a few hovering to take in anything of deeper significance. I keep continuous notes, identifying changes in my perception and any new discoveries I make over the period of time – very much like the dialogue which becomes possible when we offer our attentive gaze to an icon.

3.38
I arrive in the room. A young, very attractive, couple are hovering near the centre, wound together like Hindu statues, evidently engrossed both in the gazing and in each other – a very innocent and really rather beautiful example of love-making one with the other as they gaze, repeatedly whispering observations and insights, often stroking each other gently and caringly. The sexual motif is up and running quicker than I had expected, and it is hard not to feel left out in the presence of their evident bliss. What a superbly appropriate activity for this context!

3.46
As I do my own gazing, No4 begins to change, losing its brighter redness and becoming very dark. I begin to see some vibrating movement in the central space. The inner edges of the darker surround become very sharp in focus. I now begin to experience for myself that this whole environment is very pleasing indeed and, gently, sexually arousing.

3.53
No8 loses all its colour differentiations, the verticals at the sides are becoming like monumental pillars marking the portal into a broad landscape.

3.56
The red centre of No9 becomes highlighted and emphatic, with vertical lines/bands moving side to side.

No2 is the least defined of any of the canvases, variously resembling ferns, foliage, vertebrae, etc.

4.00
No3 becomes disturbingly vaginal – which inevitably reminds me of the couple who are still very much enjoying their togetherness around the centre of the room.

Nos5/6 - No5 is hung immediately over No6 at the end of the room farthest from the door - and remains for me the least interpretable. As I watch, the upper canvas gains a kind of heavier weightiness, and the tentative line from the upper left, pointing down, feels to be very significant for the overall effect.

People with not unattractive bodies keep coming and sitting by me or near me, radiating their body heat. Only when they open their mouths does the spell get broken. Typically, one of them is discussing getting out of here as soon as possible - to buy some chicken burgers!

4.10
I begin to experience generally much more movement in many of the backgrounds.

4.13
From near the door No4 now begins to stand out very bright in its centre panel. It is interesting to run the eye Nos2-3-4 and move towards the brightness.

4.25
At this point a complete prat of a guide strides in with forty people in tow, and they litter the place, showing various of levels of disinterest. She brashly talks facts, tedious and uninspiring facts - where, when, who, the decision to give them to the Tate, historical categorisation (modern, contemporary with Pollock), suicide – as if all this says something usefully definitive about the canvases.

She never once shows any inclination to hint how or what it might be possible to see with commitment to a suitable kind of looking. How very sad! Not a hint of the holiness of it all – no cross-reference to the Rothko Chapel in Houston. All she can manage is to compare the canvases to prison windows. How depressing – and never once a mention of anything sexual, despite the continuing activities of the couple, who seem totally oblivious to this mass invasion.

And before you know it, whiz-bang, off they go to another gallery! Thank God for that!

Someone sitting with their partner, a little longer than the average visitor, does manage to vocalise in my hearing the slightly more hopeful line, “I like this.”

Nos5/6 remain unimportant to me. I can see a contrast between the hazy, vague edges to the colours in the upper panel, with the sharpness in the lower, but I cannot seem to do anything with it.

4.36
With an appropriate gaze, I can now lose the colour differentiations in No9 altogether, and it all becomes very mobile.

4.42
Nos1 and 9 are now presenting much brighter pillars of colour at the centre – but it is No4 which increasing becomes the richest window of all, as if out onto another world.

Another party comes in – much more sensitive to the whole context, but again the guide never hints at anything spiritual or sexual that might be going on. Is she repressed or just embarrassed? Again she introduces ideas of windows, prisons, feelings of enclosure; but not even a hint of transcendence – now beaming at me through No4.

4.49
Perhaps Nos5/6 are, after all, actually the anchor points of the whole room.

What about: Nos1/9, set either side of the door, as striking portals onto the whole scene, a kind of Sylla and Charybdis; then Nos2/3/4 on one side a path to brightness and affirmation; Nos7/8 inviting two deeply contrasting ways of seeing the whole extravaganza.

Or what about Nos1/2/3/4 essentially female; Nos 9/8/7 essentially male and 5/6 as some kind of unitative resolution.

Or how about this as a way of describing the whole sequence:
No1 startles the viewer into attention;
No2 has that furry, pubic sort of feel, vaguely arousing (embryonic, sinewy);
No3 has something decidedly oral about it;
No4 the climax, orgasmic - the possibility of a window into another world;
(So 1/2/3/4 all very female)
No9 a very different phallic announcement;
Nos8/7 the two ways of seeing the world (No8 with its sense of light, an open vista, full of hopefulness; No7 with its more sinister vision of death and despair.)

4.57
I do believe I am seeing a lurking breast in the lower left of the centre panel of No4.

I am beginning to see Nos5/6 differently now – a kind of horizontal lying together, female over male, post-coital tranquility.

5.05
I am beginning to feel very much at home in this space, deeply comfortable. The intensity of the charged sexual atmosphere now gives way to a more profound peaceful and sense of security.

No4 has now an even brighter red, definitely vaginal. And No3 becomes ever more sharply focused in its pubic allusion.

So how about this as a possible process for seeing:
No9 is the entry point, providing a sharp encounter and an initial shock of arousal;
Nos8/7 offers two radically different alternatives; which window shall I choose? Hope (No8) or despair (No7)? I will choose hope! Which takes me to:
No1 which offers a strong sense of female presence, him/her together;
No2 suggests the pubic region and provides distinct visual stimulation;
No3 is all very oral;
No4 is orgasmic;
And No5/6 suggests post-coital bliss – together, her over him.

5.18 (100 minutes later)
Time to leave – and as I leave a woman takes a seat and begins to breast feed her baby in this holy place – all of which, I have to say, feels rather wonderful.”

***************

Well, I did post a warning before I began! Though it should not be at all surprising, of course, to find such a close conjunction of spirituality and sexuality. Something like it has been in the writings of Christian mystics throughout the whole span of Christian history. From time to time it has been suppressed more strongly that at others, most notably in the Victorian era – but suppression is pretty unlikely to close it down.

One way into this powerful meeting of spirituality and sexuality can be focused around the concept of ‘desire’. The mystics repeatedly tell us, with vigour, that God is only taken seriously when we make God the supreme object of our desire. But an object of desire is unlikely to sustain its attraction without some reward of pleasure – to hold absolute centre stage, being found at prayer, taking shelter in the house of God, will have to be a pretty stunning experience. But in the modern world, there is so much to suggest that the experience will be almost the opposite. Religion looks so tedious, and not a little boring, certainly in its institutional manifestations. Where modern western people experience the arousal of desire is not in an invitation to pray, but in an invitation to sexual union. But what if the two are so intimately related that, without in any way denigrating the enormity of sexual pleasure, it becomes possible to show that union with God can also be a source of immense pleasure - on an orgasmic scale. They would be queuing at the church box-office!

But this is precisely what many of the mystics seem to be saying and, in so doing, merely reflect the glorious ambiguity of so much scriptural writing. Surely the rich sexual language of 'The Song of Songs', and many of the 'The Psalms' is no accident of semantics – it is testimony to the intense and comparable satisfactions experienced through both prayer and sex. How sad that so many commentators have felt the need to defuse it all with measured allegorical and symbolic interpretations!

A really significant message for our time is that, whilst sex alone can lead to an immense anti-climax, dissatisfaction and disappointment, giving priority to prayer and union with God not only has the potential to deliver its own intensity of pleasure, but in turn can transform embodied sexual experience as well - overcoming the frustration caused by sex’s ultimate failure to deliver lasting satisfaction alone.

The truth of this was demonstrated for me quite shockingly when I came upon some of the very late drawings of Pablo Picasso. I have long thought of Picasso as one of the most extraordinary artistic giants of the 20th century, and had marvelled at his capacity to sustain creative energy (notoriously sexual) decade after decade, through times of immense personal and social change. What I had never seen before was the immense despair drawn deep into his very late works, as he experienced the onset of sexual impotence and, as he saw it, with impotence the end of meaningful life. At the very pits, he draws himself as a monkey, brush in hand, painting a beautiful model, who he is convinced will no longer see anything in him to be desired or loved! God forbid! My admiration of Picasso’s achievements remains undiminished, but my determination not to depend for meaningful life on a less-than-ultimate desire is greatly increased.

All of which makes evident sense. How could it be other? Surely the creator deserves ultimate priority over everything else in creation? Not, however, obliterating the creature and creaturely pleasures, but enriching and enhancing all that has already been built deep into the fabric of this extraordinary creation.

And I am daring to suggest that the culturally strange experience of ‘space’ provided by the paintings of Mark Rothko is one way to begin to discover some of the truth of all this. Rothko’s murals can provide a remarkable focus for spiritual reflection, an invitation to taste the joy of life within a divine horizon – an opportunity for pleasure which is simultaneously spiritual and sexual, a full celebration of being human (of which we need in no way be ashamed!), out in the light, in clear and open space, delighting in the presence of God.

I want to explore in much more detail some of the implications for Christian spirituality of taking the ‘pre-conceptual’, even the ‘non-conceptual’ option – as I began to introduce it in my last blog. At a theoretical level this might look like a pretty heavy enterprise - but there is good news; this can be broken down into some very accessible exploratory excursions, which will lead us into a variety of fascinating theological adventures.

The basic question is this: what are we going to do when the words run out? Or, to put it another way: what are the options once we decide that the deepest levels of truth – the kind which will be needed if we are to talk about God – are simply not amenable to exhaustive explication in words as we typically know them?

Well, the blanket term for those who have travelled this way ahead of us, and have made this decision against ‘words alone’ is the ‘apophatic tradition’, and some Christians have been interested in this tradition from the earliest days.

The topic is so wide-ranging, however, that we could run with it in many different directions. We might, for example, simply go visual – in which case we shall need to explore something of the controversies around icons, and we shall want to look at the potential spiritual significance of other kinds of painting and general ‘objets d’art’, such as the work of recent artists like Mark Rothko and James Turrell. We might, however, go thoroughly philosophical - and begin to trace patterns of ideas which certainly go back into Neo-Platonism, at and around the time that Christianity was born; and we might drop in on any one of a number of Christian writers who have found their way into Christianity through more mystical styles of believing; or we might even listen to some of the early twentieth century existentialist philosophers who, in their own distinctive way, encouraged something of a revival in these modes of thinking. We might also, however, go poetic. There are a number of religious-minded poets who have forcibly recognised the power of the apophatic tradition, the ‘via negativa’, as it is also called. I particularly have in mind the poems of R S Thomas as also, indeed, Thomas Merton, a prolific poet as well as committed exponent of contemplative spiritual disciplines.

So the irony cannot have gone unnoticed! It is not at all difficult to pile up a vast quantity of words, all seemingly in the cause of this non-verbal tradition!

My own first reaction to this irony is to enjoy a quiet chuckle – but then, on further reflection, I want to put down a marker which recognises that the apophatic tradition is not at its best when delivered as a stand-alone feature. It really does need its opposite number, the ‘kataphatic tradition’, in order credibly to make its way. Between the two of them, however, they can energise a dialectical movement which is immensely potent for revelatory disclosures and otherwise hidden depths from the world of human experience.

Our difficulty in the west is that, having sold out so strongly to the kataphatic over so many years – what with our preaching, our teaching, our written liturgies and our hymnody – that the only way we are likely to head somewhere new is with a massive shot of the apophatic antidote to set, as it were, the theological pendulum swinging another way. And that is what I am about to do - though we can take it in small doses and begin each unit with a thoroughly grounded artefact, like a story or a picture.

In this particular blog, I start in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, who I myself found surprisingly lucid on these matters. In the early pages of his classic text ‘Being and Nothingness’ Sartre is exploring why, in his own experience, something which is not conceptually accessible, a kind of ‘nothing’, can actually have as much if not more significance on his life than something which is in-your-face all-present-and-correct. But being a novelist as well as a philosopher, fortunately he gets us there with a cracking good yarn!

I am returning here to a paper I wrote about a year ago – but I feel I can now re-tell it with greatly increased conviction. Sartre invites his readers to accompany him on a visit to his local café in Paris – where I can easily imagine him engaged in amazingly intellectual conversation with his friends. On arrival he finds that one particular friend, one whom he fully expects to be there, is nowhere to be seen. So Sartre then proceeds to explore just how deeply significant the ‘absence’ of his friend really is –indeed how his absence, in its own strange way, actually makes his friend thoroughly present, maybe even more strongly than had he actually been there! The absence of his friend influences his feelings, his activities; in fact, it influences his whole life very deeply indeed.

Analysing this experience can help us to understand why some spiritual experiences of absence, as with God’s absence for example, seeming an experience of nothing, might become the most significant way that we are aware of a presence.

Clearly there has to be something about the absence of Sartre’s particular friend which makes the experience more significant than the experience of many other absences which, in theory, could also be credited to this café at that moment (for example, the absence of all those people, unknown to him, who live in England and have never even thought of visiting Paris). Can we identify, then, some structural conditions which make this particular absence so special?

Sartre identifies four factors, some of which are more obvious than others. First, he shows how the dimension of expectation is clearly significant – he arrived at the café with an expectation of meeting his friend, something which he brought to the experience as prior knowledge and prior relationship. Second, he identifies the importance of wonder - wonder in the sense of questioning, that is, rather than the sense of awe. Third, he names the experience of fear - why is my friend not here; has something gone wrong between us? Fourthly and finally, he points to the role of imagination – Sartre can imagine the alternative possibility – namely that his friend is actually present.

All four of which immediately begin to help me with my analysis of why a perceived absence of God might be highly significant for my counter-experience of God’s presence. First, as above, an expectation of God’s presence, whether I am a believer or not, has already fed deeply into my culture, through the inheritance of a faith community and its stories. I come with real expectations, however limited these might be. Second, I certainly come with questions; these have actually been heightened in recent centuries in company with the ascendancy of critical reason. Third, I come with fears: at root my fear of my own finite limitations, in time and in space, both of which repeatedly threaten me with the overwhelming possibility of meaninglessness. And lastly, I also come with a certain capacity for imagination, an intuition of the possibility of holy presence, even if it is too often eclipsed by my counter-culture of doubt.

In practice, I might even be tempted to condense Sartre’s four into a more famous ‘Corinthian three’ – I come to my experience of God’s absence already shaped by ‘faith, hope and love’ – and these profoundly transform the possibilities for my apparent experience of emptiness. I could even argue that they open the possibility of an unprecedented fullness. Actually, elsewhere in the same text, Sartre has the line ‘Fullness is emptiness given direction’. I might be confronted with what looks at first sight to be a devastating absence but, if I am simultaneously fed by a rich tradition which offers direction, perhaps this can be the very place where fullness will make itself known in greatest measure. That is, I think, what many mystics and the exponents of contemplative prayer are trying to tell us.

Not bad, eh! It was philosophy alright, but we snuck in through a thoroughly recognisable story, and it soon began to open up a whole new platform on which to build our further reflections. Watch this space, at this moment deceptively empty, and find out where it will take us next.

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 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.