After a lifetime of reading it's a good thing to look back at your footprints, and at the paths that have led to the here and now of life. Then to reflect on who were were, and who we are, and who we might yet become.
We all have our 'favourite' books, intellectual debts to various writers and thinker, poets and novelists, theologians and historians. They too can seem like so many mountain footpaths, winding towards each other and finally converging on the place we are now standing, or sitting.
My reading journey has involved a lot of meandering, an enjoyment of variety, places I've stopped a while and others I quickly passed through. Some writers changed the direction of my thinking, others enriched my inner landscape, many I enjoyed at the time but moved on, one or two mattered so much I have gone back to re-read. Looking back, some of those paths were a diversion without adequate reward, others took me to places which changed the way I look on the world.
We each have our network of paths, the unique pattern of our own footprints, our own journey to make. My list is not your list. But in the spirit of appreciation, I'll offer a short series of brief appreciations of those writers who I believe have helped to form the ways I think and feel about God and my own journey in trying to follow faithfully after Jesus Christ.
In the early 1980s I discovered Evelyn Underhill, the Anglican spiritual writer who was an authority on mysticism, and especially in later life, a leader of retreats that focused on the contemplative life. I read most of what she had written and published. At one point I had half a shelf of her books, all of which I read, each of them a further education in a form of spirituality not often encountered within the evangelical tradition. The titles give an idea of what she was about: Mystics of the Church; Practical Mysticism; Concerning the Inner Life; The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today; The School of Charity; An Anthology of the Love of God. And a couple of dozen more, from the esoteric to mainstream Christian devotion.
Underhill was an upper middle class woman of independent means, married to a barrister, Hubert Moore. Reading her can be an exercise in patience, her tone at times can seem quite condescending. That's to misunderstand her. She wrote for the academy one kind of book, and for ordinary Christians seeking a deeper devotional life, she wrote quite differently. At her worst she can be annoyingly homely, at her best she wrote with devotional power and psychological insight and as one who practised what she wrote. That's what made her such an effective and popular retreat leader.
A good sample of her best writing is contained in An Anthology of the Love of God. One of her best poems, Immanence, shows off the contemplative theology that informed so much of her devotional and spiritual writing. From Evelyn Underhill I learned that prayer is less about speaking than listening, less about my needs and more about spending time in the presence of the God of grace and love. There is a practicality that never depends on a simple 'how to' approach – she was not writing at the 'Mysticism for Dummies' level.
It would also be true that, true to her Anglican and Prayer Book commitments, she gave considerable weight to God as Creator and Christ as God incarnate. While not neglecting the cross as sacrifice, she interpreted the whole work of God as the Eternal purpose expressed in the very nature of God as self-giving love. The poem Immanence is a beautifully expressed theology of divine humility and the willing kenosis of the Eternal God whose name and nature is self-giving love.
While my own theology has a stronger rootedness in atonement expressed in Trinitarian terms, I owe to Evelyn Underhill a sense of the love of God made actual in Christ, and by grace replicated in 'the little things' that become sacraments as we sense and see the presence of God in the actualities of existence, in the moments of prayer, in our kneeling in worship, in bird song and sunset, and in crib and cross.
Immanence, Evelyn Underhill
I come in the little things,
Saith the Lord;
Not borne on morning wings
Of majesty; but I have set my feet
Amidst the delicate and bladed wheat
That springs triumphant in the furrowed sod—
There do I dwell, in weakness and in power;
Not broken or divided, said our God!
In your straight garden plot I come to flower;
About your porch my vine,
Meek, fruitful, doth entwine,
Waits, at the threshold, Love's appointed hour.
Not borne on morning wings
Of majesty; but I have set my feet
Amidst the delicate and bladed wheat
That springs triumphant in the furrowed sod—
There do I dwell, in weakness and in power;
Not broken or divided, said our God!
In your straight garden plot I come to flower;
About your porch my vine,
Meek, fruitful, doth entwine,
Waits, at the threshold, Love's appointed hour.
I come in the little things,
Saith the Lord;
Yea, on the glancing wings
Of eager birds, the soft and pattering feet
Of furred and gentle beasts, I come to meet
Your hard and wayward heart. In brown bright eyes
That peep from out the brake, I stand confest.
On every nest
Where feathery Patience is content to brood
And leaves her pleasure for the high emprise
Of motherhood—
There does my Godhead rest.
I come in the little things,
Saith the Lord;
My starry wings I do forsake,
Love's highway of humility to take;
Meekly I fit my stature to your need.
In beggar's part
About your gates I shall not cease to plead
As man, to speak with man
Till by such art
I shall achieve my immemorial plan;
Pass the low lintel of the human heart.
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