The etching is by Rogier Van der Weyden and is in the Louvre, one of the earliest 15th Century drawings by a Flemish Master. I have a print of this in my study. The delicacy and intensity of the gaze and the precise definition of the sketching contrasts with the sense of mystery, the artist's search for the ideal a creative metaphor for our own search for those glimpses of the love and grace of the God who comes to us in Word made flesh, and does so through the yes of a young woman. Beauty and courage, trust and risk, Divine calling and human scandal, confident angelic annunciation and free human assent – so heaven and earth are brought together through the Gift of God and the generous receptive will of a woman, and the birth of a child.

The poem below comes from  an age which we in our sophisticated postmodern mindset might dare to call credulous – but it was also an age when the human capacity for wonder was a recognised way of knowing, and an essential element of wonder. I wonder where the wonder went?

Wit Wonders

A God and yet a man,

A maid and yet a mother:

Wit wonders what wit can

Conceive this or the other.

 

A God and can he die?

A dead man can he live?

What wit can well reply?

What reason reason give?

 

God, Truth itself doth teach it.

Man’s wit sinks too far under

By reason’s power to reach it:

Believe and leave to wonder.

(Anonymous – 15^th C)

The Avowal, Denise Levertov

As swimmers dare

to lie face to the sky

and water bears them,

as hawks rest upon air

and air sustains them,

so would I learn to attain

freefall and float

into Creator Spirit's embrace

knowing no effort earns

that all-surrounding grace.

Learning to "attain freefall and float" is sometimes a big ask. It requires faith which sometimes comes hard. Such trust requires the courage to risk it all, which seems beyond us when the inner self is feeling defensive and self-protective. Somewhere in the emotional and spirtitual anatomy of faith there is the fusion of personal response and Divine Gift, or perhaps, personal response to Divine Gift. We are saved by grace through faith, which is the gift of God. Yet we are to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, while giving thanks that he who began a good work in us will bring it to completion.

It's an important pastoral insight, best learned by being pastorally sensitive to our own heart's longings, failures and fears, that being told to believe, to trust, to have faith, can be the hardest ask of all – and the hardest task of all. As well ask me to open a tin with a banana. In countless sermons, in many a praise song backed by enthusiastic singing, there can be a subtle but significant theological slippage that has far reaching spiritual consequences.

On what does my life depend? Where does faith come from? If it is all of grace, why does it seem so much depends on me believing, as if the flow of grace was through a tap I have to have the strength to turn on? And what if I don't have that strength?

Does my security depend on me holding on to God or God holding on to me?

Is it sinners receiving Christ or Christ receiving sinners that is of the esse of the Gospel.

Am I caught up into the Triune life of God, and held in the eternal security of a love that will not let me go, or does that depend on something I do, or give or think?

What I like about Levetov's lines, and why I quote them, is she understands (and later in her life came to understand with deep compassion born of her own suffering) is the last two lines.

Don't tell me to believe more. To trust more. To do this or that as if I wouldn't if I could, and if I knew what. To believe when my heart is wrung out of trust and I need to be held rather than take hold. Because it's that holding, that grace, that gift of Love Divine which as Julian says, enfolds us – it is that initiative of God, that perseverance, not of the saints but of God, whose untiring and inexhaustible grace as Levertov says bears, sustains and embraces, " and no effort earns that all-sustaining grace".

Just now and then in our lives, we come to the place where for all our uncertainties, we take the risk of saying to the God into whose life we are caught up in the love of the Father, the Grace of the Son and the communion of the Spirit, "Lord I believe – help my unbelief". The one reality that transcends thought and emotion, reason and the heart, and which persists as the truth that holds us even when we ourselves doubt it, is the spectacular assertion of Paul "Your life is hid with Christ in God".

We use the phrase a lot today, being 'in a hard place just now'. I guess we all know what it means. And that hard place can be a place where faith, trust, hopefulness, confidence, and courage require more than we are able to offer, just now. The hard place is the one that feels most real, determined by outer circumstance and inner anxiety. But the all sustaining grace perseveres, the untiring love does not weary, the life we live is surrounded and drawn into the eternal exchange of love and peace and joy – no we may not be aware of it, "our life is hid with Christ in God", and that depends not on my believing it, but on the love of Christ Crucified, the life of the Holy Spirit, and the sustaining mercy of the Father.

Come Holy Spirit, Spirit of Love, Spirit of Discipline,

In the silence

Come to us and bring us your peace;

Rest in us that we may be tranquil and still;

Speak to us as each heart needs to hear;

Reveal to us things hidden and things longed for;

Rejoice in us that we may praise and be glad;

Pray in us that we may be at one with you and with each other;

Refresh and renew us from your living springs of water;

Dwell in us now and always, Amen.

The prayer is by Father Robert Llewelyn one of the accomplished recent interpreters of Julian of Norwich, and it's taken from his book With Pity Not with Blame. From a well stocked shelf of studies on Julian, this slim book remains a favourite, especially as a guide to ways of praying that have less to do with words and more to do with inner orientation; acknowledging Presence, practising stillness, listening with the heart, gazing with the eyes of imaginagtive faith, and learning the necessary tensions between the mind thinking, the heart feeling and the will responding.

The other day I spoke with our College librarian, Dr Edward Burrows, about George Herbert and my fascination with three chosen people of genius – Julian, Herbert and Charles Wesley. Amongst their many gifts, I value their capacity to invest words with more than meaning, but with the power to communicate spiritual experiences with such penetrating integrity that they radically transform by sometimes evoking the very experiences they describe and expound. None of them use the idiom of contemporary-speak, and I guess it now requires an investment of time to learn their way with words, but to those who take the time, they may well discover the spiritual equivalent of treasure maps and the call to seek till they find.

There are others in my canon of spiritual geniuses – but those three – Julian, Herbert and Wesley, touch on a form of spirituality that for all their diversity, carries with it what C S Lewis called the scent of the far country.

As a matter of irrelevant coincidence (or unpremeditated purpose) I typed out the above prayer while listening to Albinoni's Adagio in G Major – and some of what the prayer asked just sort of happened, as if Someone meant it……

Haiku Prayer I

Dangerous beauty:

Wild freedom of wind and waves,

O Lord have mercy

 As the rain hides the stars,

as the autumn mist hides the hills,

as the clouds veil the blue of the sky,

so the dark happenings of my lot

hide the shining of thy face from me.

Yet, if I may hold thy hand in the darkness,

it is enough. Since I know that,

though I may stumble in my going,

thou dost not fall.

(Celtic, unknown)

The dark night of the soul is an experience of stripping away the assurance of the senses. Disorientation, uncertainty, loss of impetus, mean that absence is more real than presence, and the unfamiliar displaces the familiar. A spirituality fixated on the positive, and in which dogmatic assurances silence those important murmurs of dissent, is for all its triumphalist note, a spirituality of denial. Not self-denial to be sure, but a more toxic form of refusal, a denial of that mysterious withdrawing of God's sensed presence by which we grow beyond adolescent claimfulness.

The above prayer doesn't express the classic experience of the dark night of the soul. The last line of it is reminiscent of Isaiah at his most pastorally poetic, and as the theologian who best describes the rhythm of feeling forsaken by the one who promises not to forsake.

This is a prayer that allows us to be both honest and modest about our experience of God. Honest enough to confess that sometimes God's presence is not felt; modest enough not to think our own sense of God or lack of sense of God makes any difference to the reality of things, that God remains actually present even in acutely felt absence.

"Though I may stumble in my going, thou dost not fall."

Since I know that, I know the most important thing.

And even if I am overcome at times

with doubt,

uncertainty,

and the pain of unknowing,

more important than what I know,

is that I am known,

and by whom I am known.

And one day I will know as I am known,

and see face to face

the radiant p[resence

of that greatest Love.

O thou who art the light of the minds that know thee,

the life of the souls that love thee,

and the strength of the wills that serve thee;

help us to know thee that we may truly love thee,

and so to love thee that we may fully serve thee,

whom to serve is perfect freedom.

Amen    (Augustine of Hippo)

…………………

There are few more decisive arguments on behalf of careful, considered and beautifully crafted prayers than a prayer like this.

When all the valid arguments and reasons for extempore, unrehearsed, informal and immediate prayer are accepted, there is still an absolute necessity, when addressing God, to take care with the beauty of our language.

It reflects the care we take with the shaping of our thoughts and the sharing of our hearts.

And it reflects that essential courtesy that acknowledges the importance of the other by preparation, attention, attentiveness and the offering of that which has taken us some time and trouble.

 

 

The picture is of the rose I bought for Sheila last year – it too is a carefully crafted celebration of beauty, compliments of the Creator!