Symbols of the Eternal

 Gertrude von le Fort was a German novelist, poet and essayist, who wrote, "Nothing earthly is eternal, but everything earthly can become a symbol of the eternal."

And she is absolutely right. I have written before about my belief that it is the presence of the Spirit - that of God within us, which enables us to be aware of the glories around us which enables us to see the eternal in earthly things. 

But we also need to be aware of that little word "symbol". Any earthly object which inspires us to discern the eternal is always and only a symbol, not the eternal itself. Which applies not only to nature, but also to people. As the Buddha advised, "I am a finger pointing to the moon. Don't look at me; look at the moon."

Which is not to say that God / the Spirit / the Divine is not present, immanent in the world. Because I do believe that too. I believe that the entire world is sacramental and wrote about this in March 2020, here. So yes, "everything earthly can become a symbol of the eternal". But it is not the eternal itself.

We are so blessed to be able to perceive the eternal in earthly things. Let us strive to be awake and aware of its presence, as often as we can.

Nature goes Deep

The French artist and Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Cézanne, wrote, "Nature does not exist on the surface, it goes deep."

I had to think about this one... If he had written, "not *only*" on the surface, I would have been with him completely. But to say that "nature does not exist on the surface" is puzzling. Because for me, it permeates the whole of creation. The only places where nature does not exist is in completely sterile human-made environments, and even then, given half a chance, it will make its way in.

But yes, oh yes, it goes deep. A deep reverence for Nature is an important part of my faith. Growing out of the fairy tales and legends of my youth, Elsie Proctor's wonder-full book Looking at Nature, and J.R.R. Tolkien's powerful evocations of Middle Earth, I have always found it easiest to sense the presence of God / the Spirit in the natural world. Yet it was not until fairly recently that this reverence for natural beauty became integrated into the rest of my spiritual life.

This started in early 2009, when I did a module on my second Open University course, called Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age. I was particularly fascinated by contemporary Celtic spirituality, and have gone on to learn much more about it. I was introduced to the concept of the Wheel of the Year, and to the notion that we (and all living things) move through life in a cyclical rather than a linear manner, in which the dark side is to be welcomed as an important part of the process.

At around the same time, I also came across A Guide to the Sacraments by Christian theologian, John Macquarrie, which reinforced my belief that the whole of the universe could be sacramental. He explained that rather than God's presence being limited to either two or seven sacraments, God has so arranged matters that the material world can "become a door or channel of communication through which he comes to us and we may go to him." For this reason, "man's spiritual wellbeing demands that he should recognise and cherish the visible things of the world as things that are made by God and that provide access to God."

This way of perceiving the world demands that we believe that God is not only transcendent, the one-time creator of the universe, but also immanent - being in the world and acting through it. In other words, we are always in the presence of the Divine, in whom we live and move and have our being. Macquarrie also writes about material things such as stars, mountains and even cities, as "doors to the sacred."

Then I discovered the Celtic mystic, poet and theologian John O'Donohue, whose love for the Irish landscape of his birth flows richly through all his writings. One of his books in particular, Divine Beauty: the Invisible Embrace, helped me to appreciate with my heart, not just my head, how deeply God is present in the earth, in the sky, in the landscape.

Nature does indeed go deep.

As the Spirit Moves Me

I love the words of Quaker Stephen Allott: "It was this Spirit of God which breathed into our human clay to make us living souls." This is something I have come to believe in the past eighteen months or so, through reading the works of the great Celtic poet and theologian John O'Donohue. He wrote, and I have come to believe (because it makes sense to me) that our souls come from elsewhere, and inhabit our human bodies, our "clay", and go elsewhere after death. Our souls are animated by the Spirit - it is the Spirit that enables us to respond to the Divine in the world.

One of the most obvious ways in which the Spirit works within us (at least to me) is when we respond to something beautiful. Who has not felt their heart lift and their level of joy soar when contemplating a majestic mountain, or the endlessly changing sea, or the intricacies of a flower, or a man-made work of art, or the face of someone you love? Who has not thrilled to the sound of uplifting music or the songs of birds in the springtime, or the sound of a beloved voice? I believe that this is the Spirit within us recognising and responding to the beauty of the world all around us.

How can we learn to listen to the Spirit, and to recognise her at work in the world and in our hearts? I think that this may be attempted by what I would call 'sacred living' - recognising that God / the Spirit / the Divine Other is present everywhere, all the time. Sacred living is about weaving moments of attention into your everyday life, and recognising the sacred there. it is about living with a new level of awareness. It is about going through our days paying attention to what is happening in each passing moment. It is about noticing the presence of the divine, the numinous, everywhere, in the natural world, in other people, in ourselves and in things that happen to us. Sacred living is about rediscovering our sense of wonder, and living our lives in response to that.

 

 

 

 

Finding God in the Dryness

I'm not good at anti-climaxes. You work and work towards something, doing the best that you can to achieve your goal. And then you get there. At first it is wonderful, you're on Cloud 9, and everything in the garden is rosy.

And then life, as it has a way of doing, goes on. Kind friends have congratulated you on your achievement, and then something else happens, and it is time to move on. But there is a flatness, a smidgeon of "so-what-ery" about things, and it is then that I find it difficult to motivate myself to carry out the present task, or even to enjoy the present pleasure. I feel a bit like the Christian described by C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, who, "no longer desiring, but still intending, to do [God's] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."

As usual, I turn to Quaker Advices and Queries for advice. And it is there:

"Be aware of the spirit of God at work in the ordinary activities and experience of your daily life. Spiritual learning continues throughout life, and often in unexpected ways. There is inspiration to be found all around us, in the natural world, in the sciences and arts, in our work and friendships, in our sorrows as well as in our joys. Are you open to new light, from whatever source it may come? Do you approach new ideas with discernment?"

So I have a job to do - to recognise the working of the Spirit everywhere - in nature, in humankind, in the ups and downs of everyday life. I know in my deepest heart that He/She is there, but need to keep on being mindful, so that I won't miss the shining examples when I see them. And to "listen with the ear of my heart", as my friend Danny would say, so that I hear them too. And to realise how very fortunate I am to have been given the faculties to recognise the sacred at work in my life.

Penny Plain or Tuppence Coloured (reprise)

On reflection I have come to realise that my attitude towards art in a religious setting is strangely inconsistent. I find the calligraphy and floral decoration in a mosque very beautiful. And memories of a visit to the Russian Orthodox St. Isaac's Cathedral in Moscow in 1987 come back to me. Outside, it looks a bit like St. Paul's Cathedral, but inside, there is the most magnificent iconostasis (wall of icons), which again I found beautiful and awe-inspiring.

It seems that my Puritanical sensibilities are only disturbed in a West European context. Such as a recent (2008) visit to the Berliner Dom, when I was shocked by all the gold, and by the huge statues of the giants of the Reformation, Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin and Knox. (To be fair, I think that they would have been shocked to find statues of themselves in a Protestant cathedral!)

It seems that I am the child of the Reformation, with an in-built and thoughtless bias against "images" in a place of worship. I am not proud of this. I worry that my reaction varies as much according to aesthetic taste as to religious sensibilities.

A beautiful Virgin and Child in Reims Cathedral

For example, in Laon Cathedral yesterday, I noticed three different statues of the Virgin Mary and Child, and had different reactions to each. I am so not proud of this. There was a creamy white one, made of stone or resin, in the worship area in the transept. And I thought "I can see that she would be a good aid to devotion." Then there was a larger one carved from dark brown wood, which I admired for the beauty of its carving.

But lastly, there was one which I saw as tawdry, painted crudely in a white robe with a blue sash, an ugly face, and with a rosary draped over her arm, which I found to be totally inappropriate. After all, Jesus' mother was a Jewess.

But it was this statue which had the most candles lit in front of it, and which was obviously used for intercessory prayer to Sainte Marie de Laon. My lapsed Catholic husband laughed at my indignation, and poked fun at my Protestant prediliction for taking things too literally. He pointed out that the literal truth is not the key thing for Catholics; it is what (or who) such a figure represents (i.e. the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven) that matters.

Suitably chastened, I have realised that I need to be more open-minded and open-hearted, and to exercise what Karen Armstrong would call compassion when confronted with religious traditions that don't chime with my own. If a blue and white madonna provides comfort, who am I to criticise?

Senses and Spirituality

Human beings are complicated organisms - we have bodies, we have minds, and we have souls. In order to grow into the best people that we can be, we need to nourish all of them. In religion, our bodies often get ignored; all the emphasis is on what we think and believe and feel. But our bodies need nourishment too - we have to eat a balanced diet, exercise regularly, get enough sleep and so on. if we neglect them, we will become unhealthy, and all of a sudden everything seems twice as difficult, like pushing a hippopotamus uphill. If we look after our bodies, they will look after us.

Rabbi Lionel Blue shared an interesting viewpoint about bodies when he wrote: "My body is not just a lump of meat. It thinks, and has its own insight. Many times it came to my aid when my mind and my soul could not help me. I was in a train at night, surrounded by Arabs making their long way home to Morocco. Our politics and our religions were separated by two decades of misunderstanding and political animosity. It was hunger which brought us together, not theology or ideology; common hunger and the desire to have a little taste of what the other person was eating."

Before I read that, I hadn't really thought about my body having feelings of its own. But it's true: if I am sad, I don't want reasons or explanations or even spiritual insights; I just want a cuddle. And it is my body - through my senses - which gives me access to a whole world of beauty and spirituality. This morning, on my run, the feel of the sunlight on my skin, the taste of cool water, the sight of summer flowers by the roadside and the sound of birdsong combined into one joyous paean of praise for the universe.

Through what we see and hear, smell, touch and taste, we can be transported from our mundane lives into another dimension.

Bodies have their own memories too - for example, have you ever been transported to another time and another place by a smell or a sound or a taste? I only have to hear the first chord of The Air That I Breathe by the Hollies to be back in 1974, fourteen years old and very sad. I cry every time I hear it - can't help it! Even though the circumstances of my life have changed beyond recognition, and the emotional scars of young love have long healed, my fourteen-year-old self is somewhere in there, and reacts when she hears that song.

Human beings are indeed complicated organisms, and I find the fact of our bodies, minds and souls working together wondrous to contemplate. May they all be nourished in the coming days.

Living a full life

One thing I am learning is that living a full life is not the same as living a busy life. Living a busy life may be stressful and draining, as pressure piles upon pressure, and we wonder how on earth we are going to meet the next deadline. Living a full life is not the same (although a busy life well-lived may be full as well). I think that living a full life is about the quality rather than the quantity of our activities, and about the perspectives we have on those activities.

I derive a great deal of inspiration and comfort from reading the Quaker Advices and Queries. Two of these seem to be particularly relevant to the issue of living a full life:

"7. Be aware of the spirit of God at work in the ordinary activities and experience of your daily life. Spiritual learning continues throughout life, and often in unexpected ways.There is inspiration to be found all around us, in the natural world, in the sciences and arts, in our work and friendships, in our sorrows as well as in our joys. Are you open to new light, from whatever source it comes? Do you approach new ideas with discernment?"

To me this Advice is reminding me that the whole of life is sacred, and that if we can just try to live mindfully, with an awareness of the sacred and the numinous in our everyday lives, those same everyday lives will be much fuller and richer and more rewarding. I also believe that being "open to new light" is a wonderful way of living a full life - there is always room for new insights and revelations in our minds and hearts - or there should be.

The other is no. 27: "Live adventurously. When choices areise, do you take the way that offers the fullest opportunity for the use of your gifts in the service of God and the community. Let your life speak."

Live adventurously. Wow! There's a challenge. With our busy lives, it is tempting just to look after your own, doing the bare minimum for other people. In these days of DVDs and home entertainment centers and the Internet at our fingertips, it's very easy to retreat to our own little castles and pull up the drawbridge. Using our gifts "in the service of God and the community" takes much more effort. But it can be very rewarding to volunteer for something, not for the kudos it will bring you, but because it's the right thing to do.

My mother is a case in point. When my sister went up to university, 22 years of dedicated child nurturing came to an abrupt end. But instead of sitting at home feeling sorry for herself, she went out and became a Citizens Advice Bureau volunteer. That was in 1981, and she did it for more than 25 years. She became one of the most respected debt counsellors in the county, and found a great deal of fulfilment in helping those less fortunate than herself. It also broadened her outlook on life and society.

In the late 1970s, the print and poster shop Athena International also sold books, with titles like The Language of Friendship and The Language of Happiness. Each consisted of a collection of short statements or poems or quotations on the topic concerned. My favourite, to which I still turn (indeed it is falling apart) is Creeds to Love and Live By, and I have used much of the wisdom contained within its covers as readings in services.

One of my favourites, by Sidney Lovett, chaplain of Yale University from 1932 - 1958, is all about how to live a full life:

"Give the best you have received from the past, to the best that you may come to know in the future.
Accept life daily not as a cup to be drained,
But as a chalice to be filled with whatsoever things are honest, pure, lovely and of good report.
Making a living is best undertaken as part of the more important business of making a life.
Every now and then, take a good look at something not made with hands -
A mountain, a star, the turn of a stream.
There will come to you wisdom and patience and solace and, above all,
The assurance that you are not alone in the world."

The wonder of it all

I spend a lot of time on my computer most days of the week, either working, or browsing Unitarian blogs or Facebook. Having been born in a pre-personal computer age, (which really wasn't that long ago, no matter what my kids might think!) I am still blown away by the sheer wonder of it all. This was brought home to me by a comment, made about my last blogpost here, on Facebook, by Rev. Victoria Weinstein, who is mentioned in it. She had been alerted to it by a mutual friend, Paul Wilczynski, whose wife comes from my small part of the UK. So an American Unitarian Universalist minister in Massachusetts made contact with a British Unitarian ministry student in Northamptonshire, linked by a friend in South Carolina - and almost instantaneously. Can you imagine how long it would have taken, and what a complicated undertaking it would have been, before the existence of the World Wide Web?

It was Unitarian Sir Tim Berners-Lee who came up with the idea of the World Wide Web. Joshua Quittner, technology editor of Time magazine, describes what happened:

"he cobbled together a relatively easy-to-learn coding system — HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) — that has come to be the lingua franca of the Web; it's the way Web-content creators put those little colored, underlined links in their text, add images and so on. He designed an addressing scheme that gave each Web page a unique location, or url (universal resource locator). And he hacked a set of rules that permitted these documents to be linked together on computers across the Internet. He called that set of rules HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). And on the seventh day, Berners-Lee cobbled together the World Wide Web's first (but not the last) browser, which allowed users anywhere to view his creation on their computer screen. In 1991 the World Wide Web debuted, instantly bringing order and clarity to the chaos that was cyberspace."

The thing that brings a lump to my throat is that Berners-Lee could have become a millionaire, a billionaire, as a result of this inspired invention. But from the very beginning, he has fought to keep the Web open to all and free to all. Which is such a gift to the world. I salute him.

1991 - that is only 20 years ago. The world has changed so much since I was a little girl in the sixties. My life as a child then was not enormously different to that of my parents in the 1930s. OK, there were more cars, and we had a television, but my childhood activities and pleasures were much the same as theirs had been: exploring the neighbourhood (I was lucky enough to be brought up in the country); reading (voraciously!); playing board games; doing jigsaw puzzles; building lego - simple pleasures.

I think that things started to spiral out of control with the advent of the first PCs - personal computers - in the early 1980s. For the first time, this amazing technology could be owned and used by ordinary people. My first computer was an Amstrad PCW, with green letters on a black screen, and 256K of memory. And I thought it was brilliant! Then Bill Gates introduced Windows, and Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and the whole computer world took a giant leap forward. On the entertainment front, first videos, then CDs and DVDs and MP3 players and satellite television changed the way we experience music and films. Today, hundreds of every-day objects have little computers inside them to make them work. Mobile phones are everywhere, and the latest smartphones are mini-computers all by themselves.

The sad thing about all this progress is that it is all taken so much for granted, especially by young people, who have grown up with it. Remember, it is twenty years since the invention of the World Wide Web, so a whole generation has never known a world without it, my children included. If my husband and I talk to them about what growing up in the sixties was like, the response is "how did you manage without it all?" coupled with relief that they don't have to. Sometimes I will comment on how amazing I find a particular piece of technology (for example when I watch the How does it work? programme on the Discovery channel) and they look at me with pitying smiles. They are very hard to impress. Their sense of wonder seems to have atrophied.

And I think that's a shame. I hope I'm not sounding like a Grumpy Old Woman, but I really do worry about our dependence on technology for our work and leisure. I'm a victim of this as much as anyone else; if my computer breaks down, or I can't access my e-mails or the internet for any reason, it feels as though my arm has been cut off. I can't do much of my job of serving Unitarians in the Midlands without it. But I think that it is only too easy to take all our modern marvels for granted (until they go wrong). We live in an immensely complex world, entirely reliant on the work of others and on technological innovation to live our lives. We press a switch and the computer turns on, the light turns on, the car starts. We turn on a tap and the water comes out, fresh and drinkable. We go shopping, and the shops are full of goods that have been delivered by a complex logistics network. How often do we actually consider where things come from, and how many people we are dependent on for our consumption? All these things are taken for granted; it is the nature of the complex society we live in. It is mundane, every-day, not a matter for wonder.

Well, maybe it should be. If we lived mindfully, with awareness, paying attention to the every-day miracles that make up our lives, maybe our sense of wonder would return. I have a book at home called Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Every-day Life, which has really made me re-think how I approach that same every-day life. Frederic and Mary-Ann Brussat, the authors, explain: "The readings in this book reflect the wide variety of approaches and experiences of the sacred in everyday life. Many of us recognise the presence of Spirit moving in our lives through encounters with things, places, nature, and animals ... Our activities also put us on a spiritual path, [as does] being moved to service. A spiritual perspective is perhaps most evident in our relationships. We use this term broadly to refer to the many connections in our lives."

Reading it was a revelation for me. The Brussats have collected hundreds of examples from contemporary books and films, which they use to show the reader how to see the world with fresh eyes. Before reading it, it would never have occurred to me to thank my car for getting me where I am going, or to see the spiritual benefits of washing up mindfully. But I know now.

This is a very different approach to life. It involves being open and trusting, taking life as it comes, with thankfulness. Most importantly, it involves being aware, all the time, of the marvels around you, whether they are people or places or things. I'm not saying that we can do all this all at once; it is the work of a lifetime. But just being aware of this different approach to life may make a difference; it may help us to realise that the world is a pretty amazing place, and to count our blessings at the wonder of it all.