Stopping the inner whirring of the hard disk, and looking up from the limiting screen of our own busyness…

One of the great names from Twentieth Century British Christianity is W E Sangster. As an evangelical preacher his two main emphases were conversion and growth in personal holiness. One of the characteristics of evangelicalism is giving testimony to a personal experience of conversion through faith in Jesus' atoning work on the cross, and entering into a personal relationship with the living Christ. This personal daily experience of the living presence of the love of God was for Sangster more than devotional; it was expressed in a practical life of obedient living towards Christlikeness. He dedicated his life to preaching and promoting 'holiness', a word almost comically old fashioned in modern discourse, secular or religious. Such conversionist and holiness centred experience has often meant that evangelical spirituality has a particular intensity inherent in spiritual experience, an activism often tipping over into evangelistic drivenness, and subsequently a cost to be paid in exhaustion, dissipation and spiritual disillusion.

All of that W E Sangster understood from the inside. His own health broke down through overwork and too high expectations by the time he was 30. From there onwards he learned the lesson that self-care started and was made sustainable only by reliance on God's grace rather than his own wrong-headed sense of carrying the fate of the world by his own efforts. He once wrote a short prayer about building into each day what he called a "holiday for the soul". What he meant for our own times 70 years on, is honouring those moments of gift by stopping the inner whirring of the hard disk, and looking up from the limiting screen of our own busyness. Amongst the examples he gave was the habit of never walking through a garden without taking time to look at, smell, and wonder at a flower. In the fragility, intricacy, transience, frutifulness and sheer gift of that particular flower, there is grace to be discerned, and a God to be praised.

There is a discipline and a habit involved in looking for, and paying attention to, the grace of God around us. I once hit a wall in my own life trying to cope with a range of life situations that were emotionally draining and physically tiring. So I started doing that. Instead of trying harder, doing more, giving myself a hard time for not 'solving' various problems and resolving situations, I started to look for and pay attention to those reminders all around me that the world doesn't depend on my energy, cleverness, activity, ideas and performance, but on the sustaining grace of God. 

It's the same experience as Julian of Norwich describes unforgettably in her vision of a hazelnut. Get that! This is not a mystical vision of lightning laced clouds, flaming fire across a darkened sky, the complex geometry of God's arrival on dazzling multi-wheeled chariots whizzing across the cosmos at terrifying speed. God's sustaining grace is discovered in a hand holding a hazelnut. All it took was to notice, pay attention, and create enough time to see:

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’

I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”  

So there it is. A Methodist preacher as old fashioned as they come, wjose doctoral thesis was entitled The Path to Perfection, being taught not to ignore the miracle of a garden. And a medieval mystic waxing lyrical in vernacular English about a hazelnut as cypher for the whole God loved shebang that has or ever shall exist.

The photos of the roses were moments the other day in a garden centre, when I paid attention, and marveled how all this came to be, and thanked God that whatever else He calls me to do and to be, the sustaining care of Creation is ultimately God's project. We are God's delegates, called to be free agents of wonder, and commissioned to be careful and caring activists on behalf of the grace and mercy of God.