In a restless, impatient, demanding and fractured world, what are the possibilities of finding peace, cultivating patience, letting go of our claims and entitlements to make room for contentment?
And without peace, patience and contentment, what chance of us ever healing the fractures in our relationships, with other people, with our broken world, with the living core of our own being, and so with God? Yes, God, whose gift is the life we live, and whose world we inhabit as stewards, not exploitative owners
Peace is not only elusive in a culture dedicated to self-image, self-advancement, and self-interest. It is made both unattractive and all but impossible to experience. The enemy of the market is consumer contentment, or disinterest in the product. A society and culture that puts a premium on speed and instant no-waiting gratification, has no capacity for patience. In such a society waiting is frustration, slowness infuriating, and limits and delays are there to be overcome by efficiency of availability, speed of delivery and so the swift satisfaction of desire. The result for most of us, much of the time, is exhaustion – emotional, physical, mental and spiritual.
"You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." In his Confessions Augustine was writing about himself, but on behalf of every single person who has felt part of a pressured crowd, "harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd." (Matthew 9.36)
Few of us attain to that "peace that passes all understanding." That's because such peace is beyond us, unless we are open to receive it, willing to put ourselves in the way of it, humble enough to recognise that the most powerful driver of our restlessness is the pride of self-will seeking self-fulfilment.
So as a way of recalibrating my own mind and heart, I go walking, with a camera, to favourite places, and sometimes to new places. I look for what is there, and spend time seeing it, allowing my own inner rhythms and physical embodiment to be present, in the presence of that which is other than what's going on in my own head and heart.
The photos on this page were taken today, on a walk that is familiar. The trees in autumn dress were planted half a century ago, their beauty is therefore a long term project, the result of someone's vision and patience. Standing on the road, soaking in the sound of small birds, contemplating both this place, and my own place in the world, contentment seems again possible.
The swan is one of a pair we have watched and looked out for all summer. The only word that seems to describe the beauty and sheer startling there-ness of this bird at that moment of pressing the camera shutter, is grace. The entire shape, demeanour and movement is graceful, a revelation of creation at its most ridiculously beautiful.
Then there is this photo of a heron, lethal in its stillness, hungry and waiting, patiently. Often enough I've seen herons spooked and the frantic flapping to get airborne. But to survive it has to learn the trick of alert stillness and silent waiting.
Three photos of a world in which life is allowed to be, reminders not so much a lost Paradise, as of a world in which we are invited guests, and during our stay, appointed stewards. At the heart of the Christian doctrine of creation is that never rescinded mandate, to care for creation as reverence for the Creator.
In that sense at least, to enjoy the splendour of a road lined with trees in full autumn dress, and to commune with the graced serenity of a swan, and to stand for a while, watching a heron demonstrating the art of stillness – each of these is a moment of gratitude and therefore a moment of prayer.
Not all prayers need words. Sometimes "the motion of a hidden fire" or "the burden of a sigh," make words superfluous. Indeed there are times when words get in the way of those more immediate emotions and responses, those moments when we sense the presence of God in the garden of his Creation. And in that nearness we begin to understand, albeit in a rudimentary way, the importance of natural theology, and why it is that New Testament writers tie the created order so closely to Jesus Christ.
"All things were made by him, and without him nothing was made that was made…he is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
The trees glowing with golden and bronze and copper; the swan demonstrating grace in motion; the heron like a feathered statue waiting the moment to come alive – each of these traceable to the creative purposes and loving imagination of God.
Given the mess we are making of God's masterpiece it becomes an important act of creative defiance to make time, and take time, to appreciate this God-loved world, in gratitude for all it gives us, and in repentance for being vandals in the global art gallery.