​Angels often make appearances in my sermons and nearly always they prompt a story.
Angels in the New Testament perform particular functions - as messengers, ministers,
guardians and worshippers - but despite the drama of their interventions in human
affairs, as the heavenly and the worldly meet, they are a necessary figment of the
imagination. And it is in that capacity that angels have their most potent effect - as
representatives of the imagination. Although not mentioned by St Paul as one of the
gifts of the Holy Spirit, imagination, along with humour and humility, is one of the gifts
without which we cannot do. We will not travel far in our spiritual quest or deepen our
sense of God, or indeed make much sense of our religion at all without it. Imagination
not only saves us from the curse of literalism and the religious tendency towards a
controlling and moralistic fundamentalism, but it kindles within us that sense of the
other, of the beyond, of the holy. It is angels who help to transport us to other worlds,
who help us see this world in a more just and godly perspective.

Imagination - that human capacity to think and wonder and invent has been the main
burden of this book’s exploration of prayer, as it has considered the creative imagination
of poets, musicians and artists. Michael Mayne wrote in his Learning to Dance
‘It is our imagination that enables us to see things whole - and holy’ (p122) and W H
Auden said, ‘To the imagination the sacred is self-evident’. And Thomas Traherne in his
spiritual classic Centuries wrote:

‘God made you able to create worlds in your own mind which are more precious to him
than those which he created’. but as well as creating worlds in our own mind (what I
have called the world as it might be) I have also tried to emphasise the truthfulness of
the great artist (in whatever medium) whose creativity reveals to us the world as it is :
the world in its beauty and fragility but also the world in its pain and grief , and the
human beings who not only create and beautify but also destroy with unspeakable
violence and cruelty. And I have been suggesting through the work of these creative
artists that our praying can be helped by them as we too see our world as it is and as it
might be.

I now see the development of my own life of prayer more clearly with hind sight. Like
many others my praying in a formal sense at least began kneeling beside my bed at night,
and with the Sunday by Sunday liturgy of the church. And as a cathedral chorister my
prayer was structured by the day by day singing of evensong, along with the shopping
list approach which eventually seemed to me not an entirely satisfactory approach to
prayer.

I have already mentioned Bishop Trevor Huddleston and quoted from his book Naught
for your comfort. I was ordained by him and went to work in Stepney, in East London
where he was then bishop, largely because of a sermon I heard him preach in
Cambridge when I was an undergraduate. It was entitled England, Naught for your desire
(taking another line from G K Chesterton’s poem The Ballad of the White Horse which
had provided Bishop Trevor with the title for his book) That sermon was a highly
charged political, as much as a spiritual, reflection on the Africa he had left behind, with
its sense of community and more relaxed tempo, and the East end of London where he
then ministered with its pace and pressure and disintegrating communities. The thing
that caught my attention particularly in the sermon was the sense that this famous
bishop who strode the world stage as a champion of social justice spoke from a
reservoir of spiritual depth. One phrase in particular I remember:
‘If we lose our capacity for stillness (and I fear we are fast losing it) then we are in
danger of losing our identity as the children of God’

It was because of that sermon and that phrase within it that i wrote yo Bishop Trevor to
discuss my future ministry. i had heard someone who clearly lived out of a passion for
God and the things of the Spirit and who was at the same time passionately concerned
about the way the world was and how it might be changed. Then and thereafter as I
came to know Bishop Trevor better I discovered that contemplation and the struggle for
social justice (both of which he exemplified) were not miles apart, but hung together :
the acute sense that how the world was and how the world might be needed to be rooted
in the contemplation of God. We needed, so Bishop Trevor seemed to be saying, to find
a place of stillness, of silence indeed, where we might wait upon God. We needed that
before we embarked, by God’s grace and in companionship with others, on changing the
world and challenging its injustice and cruelty and violence. Both commitments were
necessary but Bishop Trevor had no doubt about where that process started. He made
his own the words of the prophet Isaiah:

By waiting and by calm you shall be saved;
In quiet and in trust your strength lies. (30.15)

At various points in the preceding chapters I have been pointing towards this one (and
indeed wondered given the priority I have afforded to silence whether it should logically
have come first). But maybe the experience of the poetry, music and paintings we have
encountered have themselves suggested a language beyond language, where even the
imaginative world which these arts have created for us are stilled and we are left with the
sound of silence.

It took me quite a long time to realise that prayer begins with this stillness, this
emptiness, this waiting, this attentiveness to God in and for himself. Maybe my change
of direction came about through meeting people who were natural contemplatives, or
the experience of Taize, the monastic community in eastern France where I first stayed
when I was an undergraduate, where silence is privileged alongside the atmospheric
worship and the robust international dialogues ranging over pressing issues of politics,
ethics and economics. No doubt reading the life of Charles de Foucauld or going on
retreat in a French Benedictine monastery, played their part. Or experiencing the long.
contemplative silences that punctuated conversation with Michael Ramsey, whose life of
prayer so clearly infused his learning and his leadership of the church. Whatever it was I
came to a recognition that God must begin with God, in and for himself. Prayer begins
with a waiting upon God. It requires a self-emptying and a stilling of mind as well as
body as we learn to pay that wondering attention and regard to that which is infinitely
precious. I love to think of the six stone jars which Jesus used at the wedding at Cana in
Galilee as he poured into them very ordinary water - jars available for use because they
were standing there empty. Was it possible I wondered to still the restless clutter of my
mind and body? To stand there empty, as it were, just waiting to be filled.

The process of waiting and stillness requires a discipline that many of us, because we are
busy resourcing other peoples’ needs, with little time for our own must-do chores and
preoccupied with work and domestic and professional commitments, find difficult,
uncongenial and perhaps a waste of time. Just stilling the mind requires an effort that
many of us find foreign, because we are so conditioned to be on the move mentally as
well as physically. It is often a pleasant and unexpected surprise when a poem or a film
or a piece of music or a painting bring us to a place of tranquility and stillness.

But if we can recover that sense of what it was like when we fell in love, or heard a piece
of music that left us drained, elated or in tears; that experience of being alone looking
out over the Welsh coast line as the sun sank in the west with the sky crimson and we
knew the nearness of God and that for some extraordinary and mysterious reason we
were loved and sustained by him. If we can recall one such moment of truth and
remember our sense of awe and smallness in the face of the other, which is yet so close
to us, then we are entering the arena of the holy where the mind and the body, the heart
and the imagination are still because transfixed by the sense of God. Contemplation is
the name we give to this sense of wonder and stillness and attentiveness - we have begun
to pray.

Of course contemplation, the daily discipline of waiting upon God may not issue in
such precious moments of heightened awareness very often. And in addition to the
toughness of the discipline there will be moments of real pain. For in the silence and
the stillness we will be left not only with the possibility of God bit also with the reality
and risk of ourselves. As T S Eliot reminds us ‘humankind cannot bear very much
reality’. In the emptying of the clutter of ephemera which preoccupy us we discover just
how empty we are. I don’t blame anyone who turns away from the practice of
contemplation at this point. Why go through the discomfort and inconvenience of silent
waiting upon God only to discover how impoverished, empty and inadequate we are.
Yet when we come to the point of silence, when our resources run out and we have
nothing; when we know ourselves to be infinitessimally small we have moved into a
place of profound prayer. All the pictures, the music, the poems we have thought about
and which have enriched us have been pointing us towards this point of contemplation,
and in many cases they will have emerged out of some compelling vision that is nothing
other than contemplative.

There comes a point when all the creativity and beauty in the world - despite their
positive virtues which allow our humanity to grow - come to an end. Indeed these
wonderful works of imagination have been pointing us to this point of ultimate
truthfulness. The Finisterre at the end of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Prayer, is not just the
last word at the end of a poem; not just a clever place name that makes a convenient
rhyme. Finisterre is the end of the earth; a place of silence; of nothing.

What we have been considering in the last few chapters as a constructive way of both
earthing our thoughts and kindling our spiritual imagination is called in the tradition of
Christian spirituality kataphatic - which comes from two Greek words kata (according to )
and phasis (image). In the sixth century CE a Syrian monk calling himself Dionysius the
Areopagite described two approaches to prayer : the kataphatic and the apophatic. The
former or affirmative approach he described as that which makes generous use of
metaphor and analogy and image in describing the mystery of God. It is concrete and
incarnational, speaking of the divine by way of vivid imagery and story telling,
emphasising the metaphorical character of all thought. For example God is father and
lover, judge and friend, raging fire and still, small voice. Franciscan and Ignatian
spiritualities with their love of nature and imaginative use of the five senses are good
examples of this approach as expressed in the kataphatic tradition. It is that approach to
prayer that we have been considering in the previous chapters.

But Dionysius also defined apophatic (meaning beyond images) or negative theology as
that which recognises the utter poverty of all language about God. When we encounter
the matchless glory of the divine we ‘find ourselves not simply running short of words
but actually speechless and unknowing’ (Pseudo-Dionysius The Mystical Theology 3).
Being stripped of images, therefore, - standing naked before God without the protective
insulation of language - is as important in the practice of contemplative prayer as the
use of images may be in reaching that point where silence begins. Metaphysical images -
of the kind we have been considering in words, paintings and music too - can help us in
our spiritual quest, and awaken our sense of God’s presence, but once we stand face to
face with God’s imageless glory we realise the impoverishment of all imagination. We
find in the Carmelite writing of St John of the Cross and St Theresa of Avila as well as
the mysticism of the English author of the Cloud of Unknowing this concern with the
limitations of words and images.

It is impossible, so this apophatic tradition contends for human intelligence to
comprehend God. Language is simply not enough. ‘God is unknowable and inaccessible
to all and altogether beyond understanding’ wrote Maximus the Confessor. He was a
seventh century theologian whose doughty defence of the words of the orthodox creed
led to the removal of his right hand and his tongue. Even this man who was prepared to
use language in defence of his beliefs to the point of martyrdom was aware also of the
limitations of language.

And St Augustine of Hippo, fourth century convert to Christianity and the most
eloquent of the of the early Fathers wrote in his confessions about the necessity of
speaking about God and, paradoxically, the impossibility of speaking about God.

God is supreme and his virtues inexplicable:

What, then, are You, O my God — what, I ask, but the Lord ourGod? For who is the Lord but the
Lord? Or who is God, save our God? Most high, most excellent, most potent, most omnipotent; most
piteous and most just; most hidden and most near; most beauteous and most strong, stable, yet contained
of none; unchangeable, yet changing all things; never new, never old; making all things new, yet bringing
old age upon the proud and they know it not; always working, yet ever at rest; gathering, yet needing
nothing; sustaining, pervading, and protecting; creating, nourishing, and developing; seeking, and yet
possessing all things. You love, and burn not; You are jealous, yet free from care;You repent, and have no
sorrow; You are angry, yet serene;You change Your ways, leaving unchanged Your plans;You recover what
You find, having yet never lost; You are never in want, while You rejoice in gain; You are never covetous,
though requiring usury That You may owe, more than enough is given to You; yet who has anything
that is not Yours? You pay debts while owing nothing; and when You forgive debts you lose nothing. Yet,
O my God, my life, my holy joy, what is this that I have said? And what can any man say when he
speaks of You? Yet woe to them that keep silence, seeing that even they who say most are as the dumb.

Confessions of St Augustine

Maybe there is a place not only in the Christian tradition, but in our own approach to
prayer for the apophatic and the kataphatic dimension.

What can I possibly say about God? : and yet woe betide me if I do not say it!
The Augustinian dilemma that takes us to the heart of Christian prayer and worship.

In my own exploration of the horns of this dilemma Archbishop Anthony Bloom,
drawing on the Orthodox tradition allows the two traditions to come together in the
most homely and accessible of human contexts. In his School for Prayer he describes his
advice to an old lady who asks his advice on prayer:

There lived an old lady who came to see me. She said. “Father, I have been asking people who are
reputed to know about prayer, and they have never given me a sensible reply, so I thought as you
probably know nothing, you may by chance blunder out the right thing…. These fourteen years I have
been praying the Jesus Prayer almost continually, and never have I perceived God’s presence at all” So I
blundered out what I thought. “If you speak all the time, you don’t give God a chance to place a word
in … Go to your room after breakfast, put it right, place your armchair in a strategic position...light
your little lamp before the ikon that you have and first of all take stock of your room. Just sit, look
round, and try to see where you live. .. And then take your knitting and for fifteen minutes knit before
the face of God, but I forbid you to say one word of prayer. You just knit and enjoy the peace of your
room” .

She didn’t think it was very pious advice but she took it. After a while she came back and told me what
had happened:
“I did just what you advised me to do. I got up, washed, put my room right, had breakfast, came back,
made sure there was nothing there that would worry me, and then I settled in my armchair and thought
‘Oh how nice , I have fifteen minutes during which I can do nothing without feeling guilty….I felt so
quiet because the room was so peaceful...and after a while I remembered that I must knit before the face
of God, and so I began to knit. And I became more and more aware of the silence. The needles hit the
arm rest of my chair, the clock was ticking peacefully…. and then I perceived that this silence was not
simply an absence of noise, but that the silence had substance. It was not absence of something but
presence of something. The silence had a density, a richness, and it began to pervade me. The silence
around began to come and meet the silence in me….All of a sudden I perceived that the silence was a
presence. At the heart of the silence there was Him who is all stillness, all peace, all poise.

School for Prayer Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

Anthony Bloom’s words help us in practising contemplation, and in discovering that this
palpable silence is not just the absence of noise for very often this silence can be found
in the midst of the daily discourse where in Edwin Muir’s words ‘footsteps fall into the
ordinary day’. The silence we experience is a presence, and has substance and richness.
But I am also aware that Archbishop Bloom, in the same book from which I have
quoted, points us to the apophatic tradition of negative theology when he writes:
‘The realm of God is dangerous. You must enter into it and not just seek information
about it… the day when God is absent, when he is silent - that is the beginning of
prayer’.

I can see why at this point we might retreat to the more congenial climes of the Sunday
by Sunday liturgy - though as the chapter on Prayer and the Liturgy indicates the liturgy
is also beckoning us toward the ‘dangerous realm of God’. I can see why we might
prefer to inhabit the spiritual world of the imagination - hung as it is with fine works of
art, where listening to music and poetry is the practice of prayer. If as Anthony Bloom
suggest the realm of God is dangerous, why would we go there? We dare to go there
because the ultimate prize is so desirable.

The novelist and poet D H Lawrence while he was helping his early twentieth
contemporaries to throw off the shackles of Victorian sexual hypocrisy and to recover a
more honest if demanding sense of what it was to be human, often, not surprisingly,
offers profound spiritual insight - reminding me that the most penetrating religious
thinking often comes from outside the ivory towers of the conventionally religious. Take
this letter D H Lawrence wrote to Ernest Collings in 1913:

One needs something to make one’s mood deep and sincere. There are so many little frets that prevent
our coming at the real naked essence of our vision ….I often think one ought to be able to pray before
one works - and then leave it to the Lord. Isn’t it hard work to come to real grips with one’s imagination
- throw everything overboard. I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of almighty God to go
through me - and it’s rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist. I often
think of my dear St Lawrence on his grid iron: he said ‘Turn me over brothers, I’m done enough on this
side’

For the novelist/poet as for the spiritual pilgrim it is hard work - we have to throw
everything overboard, and stand naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through us.
But we dare to go there and do this in order to ‘come to the real naked essence of our
vision’. In Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius the old man hears the warning and the
promise of the angel who accompanies him through Purgatory on his heavenward
journey:

‘that sight of the most fair, though it will gladden thee, yet it will pierce thee too.’
It is that possibility of seeing and receiving ‘the most fair‘, of realising the naked essence
of our vision that draws us onwards and deeper, beyond the liturgy, beyond words and
music and great painting - into that scarcely-to-be-imagined world beyond imagination
where God may be encountered, recognised and known. It is the place of the burning
bush which Moses could only approach with trepidation and which R S Thomas in his
poem The Bright Field sees as the prize which demands all we have if we are to acquire it.

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

This place has often been characterised in Christian (and indeed other) spiritual
traditions as a place of barrenness - the desert, the wilderness or the mountain. St John
of the Cross called it the ‘dark night of the soul’. And the supreme ikon of this place of
derilection and seeming hopelessness is the cross of Jesus Christ. And it is precisely
there where human hope dies and God’s great experiment in redemption appears to
come to an end, that God’s purposes are revealed, his glory glimmers through the
darkness, and the whole created order is refashioned and humankind is ransomed,
healed, restored and forgiven.
The cross is the ultimate place of silence.

We will soon be entering into Great Week when in mind and imagination and helped by
the prayer, the ceremony and the music of the liturgy we will be led into the mystery of
God himself as he lavishes his love and grace upon us. No day in this week is more
poignant and evocative - nor more silent and mysterious than the day we call Easter Eve.
I think we have no better companion in entering this week and the silent waiting of
Easter Eve especially, than the great cultural commentator George Steiner who in his
book Real Presences wrote

There is one particular day in Western history about which neither historical record nor myth nor
Scripture make report. It is a Saturday. And it has become the longest of days. We know of that Good
Friday which Christianity holds to have been that of the Cross. But the non-Christian, the atheist
knows of it as well. That is to say he knows of the injustice, of the interminable suffering, of the
waste, of the brute enigma of ending, which so largely make up not only the historical dimension of the
human condition, but the everyday fabric of our personal lives . We know, ineluctably , of the pain, of
the failure of love, of the solitude which are our history and private fate. we know also about Sunday.
To the Christian that day signifies an intimation, both assured and precarious, both evident and beyond
comprehension, of a justice and a love that have conquered death. If we are non-Christians or nonbelievers,
we know of that Sunday in precisely analogous terms. We conceive of it as the day of
liberation from inhumanity and servitude. We look to resolutions, be they therapeutic or political, be they
social; or messianic. The lineaments of that Sunday carry the name of hope (there is no word less
deconstructible).

But ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness,unutterable waste on the
one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, of
the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless. In the Utopia of
the Sunday, the aesthetic will, presumably, no longer have logic or necessity. The apprehensions and
figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and
hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savour of fire,
are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man.
Without them how could we be patient?
​
The day of the sabbath - when God rested from his labours - is the longest of days. We
wait patiently out of an immensity of waiting for the revelation of a justice and a love
that have conquered death - a revelation beyond our imagination for which we must wait
in silence.

In thinking about prayer I have tried to encourage us to use imagination in our praying
and to see the arts - works of creative imagination - as a means of stimulating and
shaping our own imagination as a spiritual resource. Not all art is conducive to prayer of
course, and sometimes art can be positively hostile to religious ideas. Though I have to
say I have often found the work of the avowedly atheist to have profound spiritual
depth and meaning. I am interested that the novelist Philip Pullman - who declares
himself to be an atheist - should have such a ‘spiritual’ palette of colours in his writing.
And earlier on we encountered Carol An Duffy’s poem Prayer , which despite the poet’s
declared agnosticism (maybe because of it) was able to offer a very profound insight
into the nature and substance of prayer, encapsulated in the final lines of the poem:

Darkness outside: inside the radio’s prayer.
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

The words of the poet, and the music of the composer, can make connections with the
life we live and the world around us - often offering us new insights and opening up new
possibilities - as well as revealing to us the often terrible truth about the human
condition and our capacity to be less than human. We shall be hearing this year and in
the years that follow, as we commemorate the Great War, a lot of the poetry of Wilfred
Owen and other war poets. Their truthful paring away at the levels of self-delusion and
deceit and vain-glory show us as we are. They reveal our inhumanity - not just that of
our forebears a century ago. Such self-scrutiny may not lead us directly to prayer, but our
spiritual growth depends on our growth in self-awareness, however painful that process
may be. There is much in our religious practices that encourages us to be less than
truthful about ourselves and the way the world is, but a Christian spirituality worthy of
the name will encourage us in a searching self-scrutiny - knowing that who we are,
whatever we have done or failed to do, wherever we go, we are loved by God who
accepts us, forgives us and so heals us. That is something I will return to in the next
chapter.

In reflecting on prayer and the arts I have been struck time and again by the material
quality, the sheer physicality of the arts. The use of the senses - sight and hearing, not to
mention touch and smell - convey to us the material quality of ourselves, other people
and the world around us. Of course, precisely because of the ‘sensuality’ - the ‘touchyfeely’
quality of the material world, religion has had a very ambivalent attitude to art as it
has to ‘flesh’. Art is seductive (as flesh can be) and we can so easily be led into idolatry
of various kinds, worshipping what is created rather than the creator. Art - works of
creative imagination - so easily glorifies matter and in particular the carnal and the
fleshly. And the fleshly - so the argument runs - is an abomination; leading us into sin
and sex. For, of course, according to a well-rehearsed theological mantra, it was through
sex that sin entered the world and continues in the world. Sex (not money) is the source
of all evil. See how easily the biblical prohibitions against usury for example are
abandoned in the Christian repertoire of dos and don’ts, compared to the continuing
strictures about human sexuality which appear to preoccupy church leaders still today!

Ute Ranke-Heinemann ( Roman Catholic theologian) in her book Eunuchs for Heaven
wrote about St Augustine of Hippo that ‘he was the greatest of all the Fathers of the
Church and was the man responsible for welding Christianity and hostility to sexual
pleasure into a systematic whole’. This is not the time or the place for an assessment of
Christian sexual ethics or the debased theology of human relationships that followed
from the strictures of St Augustine. But it was because of such strictures about the
flesh that at different times in Christian history (of both east and west) the arts have
been suspect, because they glorify the physical, they seduce the eye or the ear or the
imagination. They substitute idols for the worship of the true God. Hence St Augustine
writes in The Confessions:

When I find the singing in church more moving than the truth it conveys I confess that this is a grievous
sin, and at those times I would prefer not to hear the singer

And it is not only Christianity that shares this hostility or at best ambiguity towards
artistic creation. We find it also in Judaism and Islam as well.

Thankfully St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas were not the last word on the matter of
religion and the arts, and many have turned to art as inspiration and revelation,
deepening their sense of wonder and their understanding of God, humanity and the
world around them. Many find an art gallery or a concert hall places of disclosure and
contemplation, where the aesthetic moment of gazing at a picture or hearing a piece of
music, not only moves and enthrals but brings them to a place of prayer, of renewed
understanding, to a sense of God.

Our attention has recently been drawn to the paintings of the great nineteenth century
English artist JMW Turner, by the film Mr Turner made of his life. Turner was a
contemporary of that other great English landscape painter John Constable. Though
born within a year of each other they couldn’t have been more different. As the
theologian Tim Gorringe writes in his book Educating Desire
‘where Constable was uxorious, Turner never married; Constable had to wait thirty years
for membership of the Royal Academy and Turner was admitted at twenty two.
Constable was born a gentleman, Turner was the son of a barber. Constable left us vivid
and tender correspondence, Turner preferred to keep his counsel….. Turner is not
known to have been overtly religious …. but theologically we can see that he was an
eschatalogical painter. He is the painter of the Book of Revelation. he always paints into
the sun, not with his back to it. He paints the world irradiated with glory, and this vision
grew stronger with every year of his life. His epigraph is from Ezekiel

And there the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the east… and the earth shone with his glory

In his painting of the Chain Pier at Brighton ‘his theme is more light than it is the pier
which threatens to evaporate’.








​
If a sense of God’s glory is the theme of Turner’s experience of landscape and seascape,
then Constable was, and sought to be, the painter of creation. Although Constable
painted very few conventionally religious pictures he was a deeply religious painter. In
his Landscape Scenery Constable wrote:

who would not willingly forego the vainer pleasures of society and seek his reward in the delights
resulting from the love and study of nature…. so that in whatever spot he may be placed, he shall be
impressed with the beauty and majesty of Nature… and thus be led to adore the hand that has, with
such lavish beneficence, scattered the principles of enjoyment and happiness through every department of
creation.

As Tim Gorringe comments ‘This was no isolated pious sentiment, for in the last of his
lectures on landscape painting in 1835 Constable wrote:
The landscape painter has to walk in the field with a humble mind. No arrogant man was ever
permitted to see Nature in all her beauty. If I may be allowed to use a very solemn quotation, I would
say emphatically to the student: ‘Remember now thy Creator, in the days of thy youth’.
He is the painter of creation and if we needed an epigraph for his work it would be
‘And God saw all that he had made: and behold it was very good’.

In his 1827 painting of the Chain Pier at Brighton we see his delight in creation

His back is to the sun, as usual, as when one takes a photograph, allowing the greatest
depth for light and shade. Chiarascuro was his passion from first to last. His cloudscapes
are justly celebrated. They are not just imaginative background material but profoundly
accurate...In this picture we see a sou’wester blowing up from the channel, the clouds
massing and a stiff breeze keeling the little fishing boats off-shore. In half an hour it will
be pouring with rain’ (T Gorringe p?)

Art is a school of attention, as is prayer, for as the twentieth century spiritual writer
Simone Weil puts it ‘prayer consists in attention’. All great art helps us to see, attend to,
sense the depth, mystery and glory of God’s creation, and this is especially true of the
great landscape painters of the beginning of the nineteenth century.

When John Drury wrote about Christian pictures and their meanings in his Painting the
Word, he took a picture by Velasquez which, unlike other works by that painter such as
the Immaculate Conception or St John on Patmos, does not have an obvious Christian
or biblical context. Drury selected Velasquez’ The Water Seller of Seville. Anyone can
look at this painting, religious believer or not, and find it compelling and moving - as
well as being in awe of its technical perfection and artistic beauty.

John Drury continues:
How we should look at this picture should be governed by and continuous with how the
people in it are behaving. as Bishop Joseph Hall remarked ‘God loveth adverbs - how
words’.

‘Christianity is a way of handling the ordinary and secular in the spirit of its archdoctrine
of the incarnation of the Divine, the unreserved presence of God in material
flesh, which has the effect of gathering people together in a communion which is ritually
presented in the sacrament and realised in practical ethics. Charity makes society. That is
how we have understood Christianity so far, and it still applies as we look at the people
here in this painting. They are sharing water and both the giving and receiving are in a
mode of silent reverence, both for the water and for one another. … By making his
subject the exchange of water Velasquez attained the ultimate ascetic refinement of the
tradition of alimentary painting (ie painting feasts and banquets) which began in such
gluttenous profusion: here is the purest and commonest human nourishment. Here too
is a humanism whose nobility springs from the Christian conviction…. that poverty and
fulfilment are allied in the realm of charity’ (J Drury p 176)

There is here no speech or text to accompany the painting - and none is required. But as
John Drury suggests, this painting and others we may consider may well spark off
scriptural situations or sayings which resonate with what Velasquez here represents.
Maybe those who first saw this masterpiece would have made such connections. They
may well have remembered:

For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because you belong to Christ...shall
not lose his reward (Mark 9,41)

Jesus answered and said to her ‘ If thou knowest the gift of God and who it is that saith to thee “Give
me to drink” , thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water (John 4,10)

And let him that is athirst come. And whoever will, let him take the water of life freely

As John Drury comments, ‘Like Christianity itself in the face of the secular world, these
words do not explain Velasquez’s picture of silent and secular communion, but they may
indicate the inward values of love and acre which are forever contained here in the
bodies of people and vessels and their unity (J Drury p 180)

It may be that painters, like other creative artists, go ‘a good way further than
theologians down the ethical road of incarnation, with the silent renunciations, the
obedient humility and love for the world of mortal appearances’ as they make ‘the
mystery of things visible’.

Something of that idea of making the ‘mystery of things visible’ (or making the invisible
visible as Peter Brook describes the purpose of theatre in his book The Empty Space) is
the angle I want to pursue to support the idea that the creative arts need not be a
distraction from the spiritual quest or an idolatrous substitute, but, on the contrary, a
way of apprehending the sense of God which is conveyed in the material and the
physical and the sensual. Paintings, however seemingly secular, have the capacity to make
the mystery of things visible and require us to become pupils in the school of
attentiveness. What C S lewis in his Experiment in Criticism has implications for our
appreciation of art but also for our entry into prayer.

Real appreciation (of art) demands that we must not let loose our own subjectivity upon the pictures and
make them its vehicles. We must begin by laying aside as completely as we can all our own preconceptions,
interests and associations. We must make room for Botticelli’s Mars and venus, or
Cimabue’s Crucifixion by emptying out our own. After the negative effort, the positive. We must use our
eyes. We must look and go on looking till we have seen exactly what is there - we sit down before the
picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any
work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look, listen, receive. Get yourself out of the way.

That is a salutary caution both for art critics and for preachers (like myself) who run the
risk of being too knowing about works of art and use them for their own limited
purposes. The point that C S Lewis is making is that we must pay attention : wait in
attentive silence for the work of art or the piece of music to work on us and within us.
we need to be able to receive. Despite the saying which St Paul claims came from Jesus
himself that it it is better to give than to receive, I often wonder if (following the Lord’s
own example) it isn’t better to receive than to give - or at least better to learn how to
receive, because until we have received we are not in a position to give.

This chapter is entitled From Kitchen Girl to Walking Madonna, because two images in
particular have caught my imagination and helped me both to pray and to understand
what prayer is: one is Vermeer’s masterpiece The Kitchen Girl or The Milk Maid which
hangs in the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam.

Johannes Vermeer painted this picture in 1660. It is a study in stillness. A maidservant
pours milk entirely absorbed in her work. Except for the stream of milk which flows
everything else is still. Vermeer takes this simple, everyday activity and makes it the
subject of an impressive painting. For me it is an ikon of contemplation - because of the
stillness, and tranquility and harmony both in the colour combinations, the falling of the
light, and the composition of the whole. But most of all the attentiveness of the milk
maid as she concentrates on her work. Like the ikons of an Orthodox monastery we are
drawn into another space which invites us to be still as the mystery of things is made
visible. But unlike an Orthodox ikon we contemplate this mystery within the ordinary
and the commonplace - not in a shrine but in a kitchen. As George Herbert memorably
put it:

Teach me my God and King
In all things thee to see
And what I do in anything
To do it as for thee.

Herbert went on to talk in this poem (The Elixir) about the servant making drudgery
divine and though Herbert died twenty seven years before this painting was made, it was
this scene and the spiritual poise of the servant he no doubt had in mind.
At the other end of the scale is another woman : a life size bronze statue in The Close at
Salisbury. It is called The Walking Madonna by Elizabeth Frink. As I look at this work
and spurred on by C S Lewis ‘surrender’, it works its art in me. It courses through my
imagination, challenges my theological mind set, resets my spiritual compass - and bids
me come with her to make her prayer my own.

As I walk from my house to the cathedral each day I pass a woman of determined
aspect, striding out from the cathedral towards the city. She looks straight ahead with
single-minded purpose. She greets no one on the way. I do not greet her either or smile
at her, but in my heart I acknowledge her and all she stands for as I move into God’s
holy house, where my soul, I pray, may magnify the Lord.

The woman is the Walking Madonna. There she stands in all weathers, sometimes
holding the hand of a Japanese child posing for a picture, sometimes adorned by a
garland, or holding a bunch of wild flowers in her hand, as the wondering, wandering
public find a human shape in all the mass of medieval masonry and glass with whom
they can connect.

And yet for all her humanity the Walking Madonna is a disconcerting figure. Not only
does she speak of singleness of purpose, not only does her gaunt frame speak of spare
idealism, not only does she proclaim an integrity and a truthfulness as all great art must -
but she is walking away. The Walking Madonna walks away from the cathedral that
bears her name and which was built to enshrine the gospel verities her life proclaimed.
She walks away from shrine and altar and liturgies of infinite beauty. She walks away
from the shimmer of silver in candle light and the platitudes of priests and preachers;
away from the green sward of quintessential Englishness and the elitism and privilege
and comfortable living that surround it. She turns her back on the well -polished route
to God, as though determined to seek him out there in the city of noise and clamour,
and in the struggle to survive, where relationships are made and broken, where laughter
and love and human goodness are joyfully celebrated right on the edges of living, in the
pain and squalor and meanness of life. The Walking Madonna walks away from the
shrine as though she is searching still for some outhouse in which to bring forth God’s
Word and some hill outside the city wall where alone God’s great work of redemption
may be achieved.

These few works of art must represent the many paintings and sculpture and ikons that
have over the years most moved me and brought me to a place of prayer, through their
humanity and compassion, their emotional authenticity or their transcendent stillness. I
would like to spend time gazing at the Rublev Ikon often regarded as a vision of the
Trinity, or other ikons that draw us into their stylised contemplative stillness.

Or Jacob Epstein’s magnificent Christ in Majesty at Llandaff cathedral which was
erected when I was a chorister there when the cathedral had been rebuilt and refurbished
after severe war damage. It is a Jewish Christ certainly - but a risen triumphant Christ,
albeit without the wounds of his passion in his feet, hands, head and side. But a Christ
who rises in triumph from the rubble of war - and bears us with him.

Or Titian’s Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Frari Church in Venice or
next door at the magnificent Scuola San Rocco where a whole series of paintings record
the biblical narrative and are crowned by his magisterial Crucifixion, in which the cross
of Christ radiates an illuminated space, while all around there is the constant bustle of
the market place in which rich and poor, young and old, and animals jostle in the
maelstrom of life.

One piece, of all the many works I could have chosen, has been a profound imaginative
resource in my own understanding of prayer. It is the pair of hands which the
nineteenth century French sculptor Auguste Rodin called The Cathedral.

This statue is some two feet high carved in stone; two hands - two right hands - moving
towards each other, creating a cradle of prayer within the intimate interaction of two
people : as though human intimacy were not that far away from the intimacy of prayer.
Two people making space together - not quite touching, but creating between them a
gothic arch. It might indeed be two people coming together in corporate prayer. But
maybe Rodin is suggesting a human hand reaching out to and being met by the hand of
God. Maybe that is why Rodin called this piece The Cathedral, because here is sacred
space where not only human beings meet together but where God and humanity meet.

Rodin’s hands are famous. He had drawers full of terra cotta hands which he would gaze
at as he contemplated the intricacy of the human hand in all its anatomical detail. And
you can see in many of his works that fascination with hands expressing much more
than age or gender, but emotions too - anguish and fear in the Burghers of Calais;
remorse and pleading in the Prodigal Son; youthful virility in the Age of Bronze;
profound attentiveness in the Thinker; or the idea of humanity held by God’s grace in
his Hand of God. But for me the most poignant of all the hundreds of hands Rodin
created is this Cathedral in which the human is enfolded by the divine which comes
close to us in tenderness and love. They are hands which bring me at least to a place of
prayer; a place where the hand outstretched to find its loving companion is where
prayer begins.

​

We have reflected on the vocabulary of prayer : thinking not only about what words we
might use in prayer, drawn perhaps from regular liturgical usage, such as the psalms or
the collects of Thomas Cranmer - not just our prayerful use of words, but the way in
which words, in the hands of a poet, or dramatist or novelist - can open up vistas, enable
new understanding, extend our horizons, so that prayer moves beyond the ordinary and
the mundane to a place of wonder, surprise and silence. Of course the ordinary and the
mundane are where we habitually are, and that no doubt is where our prayer begins - in
the trivial round and the common task as John Keble put it, making drudgery divine, or
sweeping a room as for God’s laws as George Herbert proposed. And Gerard Manley
Hopkins, when he was not wondering at God’s Grandeur had some more down to earth
observations to make:

It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, white-washing
a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, - everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do
it as your duty. To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness and
temperance gives glory too. To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dung fork in
his hands, or a woman with a slop pail give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if
you mean they should. So then my brethren live.

G M Hopkins
from ‘The Principle or Foundation’
an address based on the opening of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola

Words, though they can seriously impede our spiritual progress, because they encourage
us to talk too much, nevertheless can move us, inspire us, change us - not just because
they can persuade us by argument, but because they can kindle our imagination. We turn
to the poets, more even than to the liturgists, to find both the words for prayer, and also
words that help to create the arena for prayer. This is an arena of the imagination which
does not shrink from the world as it is, but an arena where old men see visions and
young men dream dreams; an arena in which we may consider the world as it might be.

In creating this arena of the imagination where prayer may flourish, no art or discipline
is more skilled than music: and not simply ‘sacred’ music that interprets words or sets
texts, but music which in its own right interprets the world, registers the whole range of
human emotions, brings heaven and earth together within one remarkable soundscape;
helps to relate us back to the roots of our humanity, and at the same moment gives us a
glimpse of the divine, and a way of holding onto the hem of God’s garment. Sometimes
this release of imagination that brings us to prayer will happen in sacred space -
evensong at the end of the day in some cathedral, for example. Or it may happen in the
concert hall as we hear the dropping figure of the Incarnatus from the Creed of the B
Minor Mass, when we are caught up in a musical landscape that powerfully reveals to us
the mystery of that divine condescension - that the Word becomes flesh and dwells
among us.

Incarnatus from The B minor Mass by JS Bach

J S Bach enables a credal statement ‘was incarnate of the Virgin Mary’ to become much
more than a matter of doctrine. Christian teaching has to move from the head to the
heart - however important the head and the intellect may be in appropriating religious
thought. In the movement from the head to the heart we have to become enfolded,
embraced, overcome by the reality we profess. That is what music mysteriously,
powerfully and transformingly, so often effects.

It may happen in the grand sweep and narrative drive of a Bach oratorio or Passion, or it
may happen much more simply, when to use C S Lewis’s phrase, borrowed from
Wordsworth, we are surprised by joy. There needs always to be an element of surprise in
our Christian pilgrimage. Of course we always want to be in control, we don’t really like
surprises. Tales of the unexpected is the terrain of the mystery writer, and we don’t like
the mysterious or the unknown.

I was washing up one day in our kitchen at home, thinking about the next business to be
attended to. I had Radio 3 on to accompany my chores. Suddenly the clatter of cutlery
and crockery was overtaken by very different sounds. I stopped what I was doing, and
my thinking of the next thing, and became transfixed by the music - music so simple, so
repetitive, so mantra-like - that it drew everything - every sound, the ticking of the clock,
the birds singing, my own breathing - into its own timeless tranquility.

Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Part

That remarkable piece of music could go on much longer, and if you listen to it via the
links given at the end of this chapter, you will be able to enter into its sound world. It
was this piece of music which I arranged to have played on Good Friday at Salisbury
Cathedral as the congregation moved at mid day from the cathedrals’ nave to the quire
for the Good Friday Liturgy. It enabled us to make the transition from one space to
another, from the outside world to the inner shrine, and by analogy it helped to still our
busy, restless minds as we came to contemplate the divine reality most exquisitely and
cruelly defined for us in the figure of a man dying on a cross. Music helped us to move
in imagination, as well as in mind and body, into another world that pressed upon our
own.

As you were coming into this room earlier you will have heard some medieval plain
chant taken from the liturgical rite known as the Sarum Use, which was developed and
perfected at Salisbury Cathedral but which by the Reformation was the almost universal
rite used in the British Isles. You would expect me, as a former Precentor of Salisbury
Cathedral, to make some mention of the Sarum Use in a talk about music and prayer.
Of course chant - the ancient music sung in the western church but only really rediscovered
and given new currency in the nineteenth century by Dom Prosper
Gueranger at Solesmes Abbey, in France - has been given a new lease of life beyond the
church in recent recordings by monks of the Spanish monastery of Silos which achieved
success in the popular music charts.

Some years ago a hospice nurse from Montana in the United States came to see me
while on a visit from America. He told me that all the doctors, nurses and carers at the
hospice where he worked were musicians - and music was a major component in the
nursing and palliative care of patients and their families. He said ‘We often use plainsong
when we tend the terminally ill. Because there are no bar lines, there’s a sense of
timelessness or eternity about the chant. We believe it helps those who are dying to
unbind; to let go of time and slip into timelessness - not into oblivion but into what you
and I might call God’s time’. And, there in my sitting room, he sang this plainsong Kyrie
from the Missa de Angelis, to illustrate his point.

KYRIE from Missa de Angelis

Shortly before his death I visited Michael Mayne who after his retirement as Dean of
Westminster moved with his wife Alison to Salisbury. I knew that Michael had only days
or possibly hours to live. He couldn’t speak but his eyes smiled and he took my hand in
his. I said some prayers with him - which I am sure included part of Psalm 139 - and
then I sang. I sang that Kyrie from the Missa de Angelis with the words of that
American nurse in mind: ‘There’s a sense of timelessness about the chant...which helps
those who are dying to unbind’

Of course it’s not only as we approach death that music can evoke this sense of the
timeless and the eternal. And it’s not only the simplicity of the chant that can achieve it,
though the monastic chant certainly has that timeless quality which in prayer we attempt
to recover. And that timeless quality is paradoxically achieved through the most timebound
of all the creative and imaginative arts - namely music.

In this entry into timelessness which our prayer can learn from our experience of music
we may get the impression that prayer, like some music, is an escape from the exigencies
of life, but as we shall see music like prayer roots us in the world as it, in a life ‘nasty,
brutish and short’, while at the same time offering a vision of the world as it might be.
Prayer is not an escape from life’s realities though it has a transcendent quality. In the
words of the hymns ‘it brings all heaven before our eyes’ In prayer we come close to
God : time and eternity meet.

Peter Schaffer’s remarkable play about Mozart called Amadeus is based on the alleged
rivalry between Mozart and his fellow composer Salieri. Here is an excerpt from the play,
where Salieri consumed with jealous resentment at the unmatchable musical genius of
the uncouth boy Mozart, hears the strains of Mozart’s slow movement from the
Serenade for Thirteen Wind Instruments

Salieri And then right away the concert began. I heard it through the door - some Serenade: at first only
vaguely - too horrified to attend. But presently the sound insisted - a solemn Adagio in E flat.

Mozart Serenade for Thirteen wind Instruments (Gran Partita) Slow Movement

It started simply enough: just a pulse in the lowest registers - bassoons and bassett horns - like a rusty
squeeze box. It would have been comic except for the slowness, which gave it instead a sort of serenity.
And then, suddenly, high above it, sounded a single note on the oboe.

It hung there unwavering - piercing me through and through - till breath could hold it no longer, and a
clarinet withdrew it out of me, and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight it had me trembling. The
light flickered in the room. My eyes clouded… The squeeze box groaned louder, and over it the higher
instruments wailed and warbled, throwing lines of sound around me - long lines of pain around and
through me - Ah the pain! Pain as I had never known it. I called up to my sharp old God, ‘What is
this?… What?’ But the squeeze box went on and on, and the pain cut deeper into my shaking head
until i was running - dashing through the side door, stumbling downstairs into the street, into the cold
night, gasping for life.

‘What? What is this? Tell me Signore. What is this pain? What is this need in the sound?
Forever unfulfillable yet fulfilling him who hears it utterly. Is it your need? can it be yours?
Dimly the music sounded from the salon above. Dimly the stars shone on the empty street. I was
suddenly frightened. It seemed to me I had heard a voice of God- and that it issued from a creature
whose voice I had also heard - and it was the voice of an obscene child! Mozart!

What is this pain? What is this need in the sound? Forever unfulfillable yet fulfilling him who hears it
utterly. Is it your need? Can it be yours?

Salieri’s question to his ‘sharp old God’ reminds us that the pain of our humanity that is
conveyed even through the beauty of our world, is a pain that finds its correspondence
in the heart of God. How could it be otherwise when scripture tells us that the Christ
who has entered into the heavens has the never-to-be erased wounds of his passion
upon him. Only thus can he be our intercessor before the Father. The pain of the world
is God’s pain; our need is his need. Somehow through the beauty of Mozart’s music
Salieri heard the voice of God and the recognition that in St Paul’s words ‘God was in
Christ reconciling the world - and all its sorrow and hurt - to himself ’.

Karl Barth, the great Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, wrote in his Church
Dogmatics about Mozart that he ‘ conceived and composed a type of music for which
‘beautiful’ is not a fitting epithet: music which is not mere entertainment, enjoyment or
edification, but food and drink; music full of comfort and counsel for his needs; music
which is never a slave to its technique nor sentimental but always ‘moving, free and
liberating, because wise, strong and sovereign’. And Barth continues that in Mozart’s
music we hear the ‘whole context of Providence, and the harmony of creation’. Barth
recognises that in that Mozartian harmony, the shadow also belongs but ‘the shadow is
not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot
degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim
undisputed sway’.

In the music of Mozart, Barth seems to be saying, the world as it is is revealed to us, but
also in the transcendent quality of the music, the world as it might be. And the yearning
quality which Schaffer’s Salieri identifies in Mozart’s music recognises this paradox.
Music even when it captivates us with its beauty can also fill us with yearning - a sense of
unfulfilment even as it fulfils us. It’s an extraordinary paradox that represents a profound
spiritual truth. For prayer too is about a hunger and a yearning. It is expressed by St Paul
in his epistle to the Philippians:
I have not yet reached my goal : but I am still running, trying to capture that by which I have been
already captured.

The sense that even when we have been embraced by God we still yearn for more : to
capture that which has already captured us. It is that sense of yearning and longing that
music - perhaps most of all the arts - instills in us.

That suggestion that beauty can be a piercing beauty which fills us with longing and
brings us, as Salieri suggests. into the pain of God, reminds us that prayer too is a way of
engaging with the world as it is. Prayer does not evade or ignore the world’s pain and
anguish and violence and cruelty - why else would prayer (Christian prayer at least) be
done always conscious of the outstretched arms and fearfully pierced hands of the one
through whom Christians make their prayer.

I often remember a radio broadcast by Mother Mary Clare the Superior of the Sisters of
the Love of God at Fairacres. She was asked about the monastic practice of rising in the
middle of the night to rehearse the Night Office. She said that in the small hours of the
night humanity was most vulnerable. More suicides are committed then, people are
alone and in pain; when the homeless are most alone and friendless, and the desperate
most despairing. ‘ It is for them in particular that we pray in the middle of the night’.

Sometimes it is music that opens our imagination - our hearts as well as our minds - to
the world’s anguish. I was at a Promenade Concert in London in 1968 when
Rostropovich played the Dvorak cello concerto on the day (August 20) when Soviet
tanks rolled into Prague to crush Alexander Dubcek’s liberal reforms. Ironically
Rostropovich was accompanied by a Soviet Orchestra in that performance of a great
work by a great Czech composer. During the concerto’s hushed opening the Royal
Albert Hall resounded to strident yells of protest. In his review of the concert for the
Daily Telegraph Julian Lloyd-Webber wrote:

It must have been a nightmare for the cellist, yet Rostropovich proceeded to give a
performance of such intensity that no one could have left the hall with any doubt about
his feelings towards the invasion….In their very different ways both politics and music
aspire to influence the human condition’. And then Lloyd Webber added words from the
Book of Ecclesiasticus:
‘Pour not out words where there is a musician’

Dvorak Cello Concerto

Music so often takes us to the heart of the human condition - and so music becomes a
vehicle for prayer as we recognise our world as it is, and we pray for those especially who
bear the burden of its pain and violence.

Yesterday January 27, National Holocaust Day, commemorated the seventieth
anniversary of the liberation of Aushwitz and the end of the holocaust in which
millions of Jews, as well as gypsies, gay and mentally ill people died.

Jewish chant from the synagogue

As Howard Goodall writes in his book ‘The Big Bang‘ there are no easy answers to
account for being moved to tears by notes on a page, or of being stirred to anger and
action, or being comforted in our loneliness. ‘It is a mystery how Rachmaninov’s flowing
melodies and ripe harmonies make people feel romantic and amorous… or how
Shostakovitch manages to express all Russia’s Stalinist agony without losing the
essentially unbreakable spirit of the people at the same time. It is a mystery why
Tippett’s use of Negro spirituals in his 1945 secular oratorio A Child of our Time so
perfectly captures of the victims of Nazism in the second World War

Tippett A Child of our Time

It is a mystery - prayer helps us not to solve the mystery, but to enter into it. And music
is often the key that opens the gate and unlocks the imagination and helps us to pray.
Because it engages our emotions and kindles our imagination in the mysterious way
Howard Goodall describes, music will often enlarge and enrich our life of prayer, and
indeed lead us to pray.

Sometimes music in church will do this for us - and it was St Augustine the third century
Bishop of Hippo who is thought to have said ‘Those who sing pray twice’. Sometimes it
is hymnody - wonderful words sung to a fine tune. How shall I sing that majesty for
example, with words by John Mason and the tune Coe Fen by the twentieth century
composer Ken Naylor; or Charles Wesley’s peerless O thou who camest from above
sung to SS Wesley’s Hereford; or When I survey the wondrous cross, sung to
Rockingham - with its wonderful final verse:

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing so divine
Demands my soul, my life, my all

St Augustine had a point!

Many of us will have experienced the way music brings us to prayer through the worship
associated with Taize - the ecumenical, international, monastic community in eastern
France which has been such a force for renewal within the church and beyond it - not
least in its powerful empathy with young people. Of course professional Church
musicians tend to be sniffy about Taize chanting - too simple, too saccharine, too
unsophisticated. But it’s precisely because of its simplicity and memorability and mantra
-like repetition ‘that the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over and our work is
done’ and we come into an arena of prayer where even surrounded by two thousand
people, when the chant stops there is a palpable silence which enfolds and embraces us -
as though God himself were present and listening and spreading his mantle around us.
As the melody of the chant dies away we are - in company with others - brought to a
place of peace, silence and tranquility - and we are at home; at home with God.

Taize Chant

Maybe the last word should rest with the early twentieth century poet Siegfried Sassoon
whose poem Everyone suddenly burst out singing expresses the capacity of music (singing in
this instance - music in which everyone can participate) to express the beauty and the
tears of life, and also allows us to transcend even the worst horrors of our world (and
horror drifted away) so that we come at last to an eternity of song - a kind of vision of
heaven that enfolds us all. - the singing will never be done. That thought has much to teach us
about prayer.
​
EVERYONE suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields;
on—on—and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but
Everyone was a bird; and the song was wordless;
The singing will never be done.

Heart in Pilgrimage, the title of this series of talks, is taken from George Herbert’s
poem Prayer, of which you have a copy in your hand and to which I shall return. I chose
it as a title, because the phrase - heart in pilgrimage - suggests that prayer is as essential
to our spiritual being as a heart beat is to our physical being. But it suggests too that
prayer is more than a cognitive or intellectual exercise (although, as we shall see, the
mind has its part to play in prayer). Prayer involves our senses, our intuitions and our
emotions and, most of all, our imagination. But the heart in pilgrimage also suggests
that prayer is a spiritual journey, of discoveries and encounters along the way. Prayer is a
dynamic process of growth, movement and surprise. with moments of refreshment and
rest along the way, which may also at times take us through deserts and wilderness, and
arid or terrifying landscapes. But pilgrimage, though it can be a solitary endeavour, is
most often an accompanied journey. We do not travel alone. We travel with companions
- literally bread-sharers. And that maybe is a good description of the church at its best -
a company of travellers who share their bread and sustain us in our common quest. And
a pilgrimage also suggests a direction of travel, a destination towards which we travel,
and gives point and purpose to our journey. It’s a rich idea both in the Old Testament
which tells the history of the wandering people of God, and in the New Testament
which returns to the pilgrimage refrain with such verses as ‘we have here no abiding city
but we seek one to come.
​
George Herbert ends his sonnet on Prayer with the words ‘Something Understood‘ as
though at the end of our pilgrimage we arrive, all is made clear, the penny as it were has
dropped. Prayer is something like that - a penny dropping, a moment of insight or
disclosure when things make sense. Prayer is like that - not really getting it, often being
in a muddle, but occasionally the penny drops. A few years ago I wrote the text for an
oratorio called Resurrection for which my partner Simon McEnery wrote the music. The
text was based on the Resurrection appearances narrated by St John in his gospel. One
of the movements goes like this:

We didn’t get it - not for a moment
The sense that the Kingdom is close
As close as breathing
Nearer than hands and feet
We didn’t get it
Or maybe just for a moment
As he scanned the horizon
Or the sideboard of life
Or the clamour of the market
To find the ikon
To open our eyes
To find the word
To penetrate our deafness

He offered us
The birds of the air
The fish in the sea
The flowers in the field
And he drew God for us
In their company
But our minds focussed
On the weight of the catch
The price at market
The cash flow and bank repayments
He tried that too
Pearls of great price
Taxes for Caesar
Sharp business practices

We didn’t get it: not for a moment
Or maybe just for a moment
As we caught the drift of his mind
The whiff of his silence
The pebble dropping into the void
And rippling against the banks of our minds
Or the blanks of our minds
We weren’t prepared for Easter
Though the landscape had been changing
To us he was the gardener, the fellow traveller
The cook upon the sea shore, up before the rest of us
It didn’t take time when it happened
In an instant, when the penny dropped
We saw and were seen
We loved and were loved
Everything remained the same
And everything had changed for ever
In the twinkling of an eye

Prayer is sometimes like that - a moment of revelation which deepens the colour of
everything, causes you to see what has always been there, but perhaps never been seen
so vividly. That is why I guess Jesus talked about the Kingdom of Heaven as being upon
his hearers, close by, within their grasp but all too often ignored or invisible to their preoccupied
minds. As he looked out to the far horizon or gathered images from the
sideboard of life he drew the contours of God’s Kingdom where the men and women
of his day were, - where they lived and moved and had their being. Christianity has
become a series of propositions, credal statements requiring assent, dogmatic utterances
demanding adherence. But it wasn’t always so. I often say that Christian faith is built
around five meagre ingredients - a name, a story, a piece of bread, a sip of wine and
each other. There’s more to it than that - we need the letters of Paul to reflect on the
name Jesus, - the name that is above every name, before which every knee shall bow in
heaven and earth and under the earth; we need the gospels to tell the story of Jesus - his
public ministry, his preaching and teaching, his miraculous works, his life of intimate
relationship with the Father, his compassion and care for the outsider, the marginalised
and the desperate, his inspiration and challenge to his followers and the culmination of
his whole life in his dying and rising. And as a way of taking that story and name of
Jesus into our own lives, and being part of his way, sharing his values and living the
ethics of the Kingdom he proclaimed, he gave us the remnants of a meal to share - a
fragment of bread and a sip of wine , over which he had said those startling words ‘This
is my body; this is my blood’ Through that meal sharing we become ‘companions of
Christ’ - literally bread sharers. As a result we have each other for we who are made one
bread one body - Christ’s bread; Christ’s body - have become, by grace, the church,
given to each other as part of God’s gift to each of us.

Many words have been penned and books written to amplify the Christology, the
sacramental theology and the ecclesiology that my initial five meagre ingredients of
Christian life suggested. Not all of them have been helpful or brimming with Christian
love, for words try to pin down what cannot be pinned down, express the inexpressible,
and either over-complicate matters or paradoxically over-simplify them. As we have tried
to define what we believe, or tried to distill the essence of faith, so we have moved
further from the truth, mired in words and arguments, and causing divisions and rifts to
appear between Christian communities and traditions. Sometimes those verbal
disagreements were reinforced by terrible brutality and blood letting. We would like to
think that such implacable religious hostility was a thing of the distant past, but the
Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the events in many parts of the world in the last few
months suggest that religions still have their part to play in fomenting rather than
resolving the world’s disorder. We can’t put social mayhem caused by the religious
bigotry of the few down to the inherent divisiveness of Christianity or Islam or Judaism
- the issues are too complex for such simplistic definition. But the religions of the Book
- the great Abrahamic religions - do have a capacity it seems for over-stating, overdefining,
over-articulating what is truly beyond statement and definition, and locking up
their adherents within those religious prisons.

No doubt there is a place for doctrinal wordplay and argument and disagreement in the
search for truth, but it is important in all three Abrahamic traditions that the book and
its words - whether the Tanakh, the New Testament or the Qran - are complemented by
prayer and worship - a place and a posture where words are translated into prayer; a
place indeed which moves us beyond words into a place and a posture of silence.
There is a wonderful passage in The Confessions of St Augustine where Augustine
itemises the attributes of God in a list of paradoxes (you have the quotation on your
leaflet) Augustine is driven to conclude that nothing can be said about God - supreme,
almighty and beyond words. What more can be said about God or in praise of him? And
yet woe betide me if I do not say it!

What, then, are You, O my God — what, I ask, but the Lord ourGod? For who is the Lord but the
Lord? Or who is God, save our God? Most high, most excellent, most potent, most omnipotent; most
piteous and most just; most hidden and most near; most beauteous and most strong, stable, yet contained
of none; unchangeable, yet changing all things; never new, never old; making all things new, yet bringing
old age upon the proud and they know it not; always working, yet ever at rest; gathering, yet needing
nothing; sustaining, pervading, and protecting; creating, nourishing, and developing; seeking, and yet
possessing all things. You love, and burn not; You are jealous, yet free from care;You repent, and have no
sorrow; You are angry, yet serene;You change Your ways, leaving unchanged Your plans;You recover what
You find, having yet never lost; You are never in want, while You rejoice in gain; You are never covetous,
though requiring usury That You may owe, more than enough is given to You; yet who has anything
that is not Yours? You pay debts while owing nothing; and when You forgive debts you lose nothing. Yet,
O my God, my life, my holy joy, what is this that I have said? And what can any man say when he
speaks of You? Yet woe to them that keep silence, seeing that even they who say most are as the dumb.
Confessions of St Augustine

I love that passage because it poses the dilemma for all theologians and indeed for all
Christians who think about and care about their religion and the wisdom it imparts - to
say or not to say. We have to follow Augustine knowing that though there is nothing to
say as we come face to face with God - yet we must say it!

Yet even when we Christians move from the academy and the soapbox - where words
are everything - to the place of reflection and prayer we are confronted with yet more
words. Open your Book of Common Prayer, or your daily Missal, or your Common
Worship and you will find not blank pages - a tabula rasa - but page after page of words.
Prayer is words - lots of them!

(I have to admit that on one occasion my bluff was called. I opened my prayer book to
begin a service only to find that the book which looked so innocently like every other
copy of Common Worship actually contained only blank pages! ….)

Of course it was the Reformation that put the Word (that is the Word of God) centre
stage. The English bible was placed by law in every church, and the payer books of
Thomas Cranmer (1549 and 1552) were in English and the scriptures were read in the
liturgy in ‘a language understanded of the people’. Allied to the reading of scripture was
the priority accorded to preaching. Cranmer provided a book of homilies to help priests
stuck for a sermon to fill the gap. No wonder that Diarmaid McCulloch in his book
Silence: A Christian history, sees the Reformation period as inaugurating ‘one of the
noisiest periods in Christian history since its first two centuries : noise was the
characteristic of the mainstream Protestant reformation’. And in addition to the new
emphasis on the Word and the words which attended it, was the exclusion of the nonverbal
- ceremony, colour, vestments, incense, candles, the ring in marriage, and signing
with the cross in baptism, processions and veneration of saints. All these which were
part of medieval worship, giving substance and texture to the spiritual life of the people,
were at a stroke removed from the liturgy. And within the following hundred years the
situation grew even more dire as even music in church except for the chanting of
metrical psalms was forbidden, and Christmas itself was abolished under Cromwell’s
Commonwealth.

No wonder EM Forster in A Passage to India has one of his characters, Mrs Moore,
describe the faith as ‘poor, talkative, little Christianity’ because even the Word of God
has been submerged beneath the babble of human words.

In these talks I want t suggest that imagination is a key component in our understanding
and our practice of our faith (indeed I would dare to venture for understanding or
practicing any religious faith). Our theology is impoverished without imagination, our
worship and our liturgy are dry husks without imaginative creativity, our pastoral care of
people, our capacity to reach out to others, is entirely compromised without imagination.
And prayer is simply undoable unless we allow our imagination to be kindled. In the
next two talks I want to consider the imaginative contribution of artists and musicians to
our spiritual economy, and in the final talk I want to consider the contribution of silence
-from which all imagination springs - to the life of prayer. Today having so summarily
dismissed words, and the noisy clamour of wordy religion, I want to retreat from some
of my strictures and address the question implied in the title of today’s talk ‘How do we
find the words for prayer?’

If I were giving a talk on liturgy today I would want to remind us that liturgy is a
drama, literally a doing. And though we are suspicious of the idea of performance, lest
our worship should become like play acting, and more theatrical than prayer and praise
should be, performance is what we are about, and we are not just an audience, listening
attentively, but we are participants in the drama, co-celebrants whether or not we are
reading, or leading the prayers, or administering communion. Fortunately the modern
liturgical revisions of our church and almost every other mainstream Christian
denomination have restored to us the sense of liturgy as ceremony and rite, of action
and colour and gesture and movement that complement the words of the prayers.
Nevertheless the Book of Common Prayer and its successors do provide us with a
compendium of prayers that through constant repetition have passed into our spiritual
blood stream - not just the Lord’s Prayer, but the Collect for Purity, the Prayer of
Humble Access, the Prayer of Thanksgiving and the Confession from morning and
evening prayer. Cathedral choristers next door at Westminster Abbey and in the 43
cathedrals of England don’t know it but because they sing the Coverdale translation of
the palms in the BCP everyday they are exposed to some of the greatest literary texts in
the world. More than that they are committing to memory poems that may become part
of their prayer anthology for life. I didn’t appreciate the daily repetition of the psalms
when I was myself a cathedral chorister in Wales. But I appreciate it now because when I
go to visit someone in hospital, maybe someone coming to the end of their life, and I
want to pray with them, the psalms come immediately to mind, giving me words that are
both beautiful and true that consolidate my own faith and I hope give hope and comfort
to the visited.

O God thou hast searched me out and known me……..

The psalms and Cranmer’s collects as well as the prayers I have already mentioned
provide us with an anthology of words that can become part of our own personal
prayer. But more than that the liturgy also provides structure and order, a sequence and
a rhythm of prayer . You may not always or ever go to the cathedral here or elsewhere
for evensong or morning prayer. But whenever you hear the bell being rung calling the
faithful to worship - rather like the peasants in Jean Francois Millet’s painting The
Angelus - stop if you can for a moment and say a prayer (thank you God, or God bless
you to a stranger will do). For the bell tolling, and the prayer that is offered daily is open
to all, costs us nothing (actually it costs a fortune but that’s another story)and happens
every day whatever the circumstances. It is common prayer - and its embrace is wide and
welcoming and bidding us find that peace of God which passes all understanding. I
hope I have said enough about the liturgy and the daily offering of prayer which St
Benedict in his rule described as the opus Dei to convince you that though words are not
the only or the most important thing about prayer, they do provide a resource and a
stimulus to our imagination, and we do well to cultivate the tradition of prayer which the
daily office of the church represents, whether we gather with others in church or
cathedral or whether we find time at home (or even in the train using an i-phone app).
Praying regularly is like breathing ; its the heart in pilgrimage; it’s so common place as to
be taken for granted. But if it stops you would know all about it….or not!

In these talks I want to talk most of all about imagination in our spiritual repertoire of
gifts. Imagination doesn’t appear in the New Testament as one of the gifts of the Holy
Spirit which you will remember are listed by St Paul thus:

And yet the New Testament, cast as it is as a narrative, rather than a series of
propositions or a confession of faith or a work of philosophy - the New Testament
conveys the teaching of Jesus in a series of parables of unparalleled imaginative force,
that invite the hearer to inhabit the landscape sketched for us. We recognise in our
mind’s eye the road to Jericho, we see all too clearly the domestic tension caused by the
young lad wanting to take his inheritance and squander it in his own way, we all have
begun to make excuse when invited to some engagement that presents some kind of
challenge, or doesn’t quite fit our time table. Even when Jesus sits with his disciples and
preaches what is popularly known as the Sermon on the Mount he gives them startling
and unexpected clues to the way happiness might be attained - clues which need ears to
hear certainly, but also imagination in order to understand, inhabit and explore.

The bible invites us to use our imagination as a way of discerning the ways of God, as a
way of making connections, as a way of interpreting the world which we inhabit, making
sense of it, and of our place within it, and discovering the meaning and purpose of it
all. We may think that theNew Testament for example is narrowing the focus, becoming
more and more prescriptive, marginalising imagination ‘as the winds of false
doctrine’ (and there is certainly an element of that as St Paul for example says ‘There is
no other name…) But I am always amazed by the imaginative scope of the New
Testament as the narrative of Christ’s birth for example is taken by St Paul who never
directly refers to the birth of Christ or for that matter to barely any event in the life and
ministry of Jesus apart from the over-riding events that preoccupy Paul’s imagination,
namely the dying and rising of Jesus. Paul reflects on the whole redemptive scope of
Christ’s life from birth to death and sees there not a baby cradled in a manger but the
image of the invisible God the first born of all creation,
for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth:
everything visible and invisible,
Thrones, dominations, Sovereignties, Powers -
all things were created through him and for him

Even the Book of Revelation which has too often been used by Christian
fundamentalists as a prescriptive piece of finger-wagging moralism, depicting in some
literal sense the judgement that awaits us if we don’t conform to the narrow precepts of
an unredeemed religion - even Revelation, if read for its metaphorical and poetical value,
becomes a source of human wisdom and insight into the mysteries of God.
I often think that when Jesus took his disciples to task for not seeing the obvious
glimmerings of the Kingdom of God in their lives and in the world around them, with
the words ‘O ye of little faith’ he meant to say ‘O ye of little imagination’!

We need to encourage our imagination, even if allow the tradition of scripture, and the
church and the inherited spirituality of the Christian past to interact with, be in dialogue
with, and sometimes act as a corrective to wilder flights of imagination.

My own introduction to prayer was on the lines of a shopping list - requests to
God to order the universe to my convenience or advantage (a la Gwen Raverat),
but two things jolted me out of my shopping list approach to personal prayer. The
first was a visit to France in 1969. I had been given a scholarship by my Cambridge
college which allowed me six weeks in France researching a subject of my choice. I
chose to visit a number of French Benedictine monasteries. For the first time I
encountered communities of men for whom prayer was away of life. Prayer for
them was not simply an add-on; something to be done when there was time and it
could be fitted in; a ritual for Sundays, or for a quarter of an hour each day - like
listening to the news. Yes, the monastic day was punctuated by communal prayer
when the community gathered for its Liturgy of the Hours or its Offices day and
night. But it never felt as though prayer was confined to or exhausted by those set
moments of formal prayer. When I asked the Frere Hotelier at St Benoit sur Loire
‘When is the next office’ he said ‘The next office is le repas - the lunch time meal’
As though to say prayer was not only about church going (important though that
is in the formation of the community); prayer - or the Opus Dei as St Benedict
called it - was being prayed when we ate together, when the monks gardened or
worked on the farm or in their glass factory, or prepared the monks’ meals or
welcomed a new guest or - most of all - when the abbey observed its habitual
silence - waiting on God. The Rule of St Benedict begins with the word Osculte -
Listen. Silence is for the monk the arena for the presence of God. For only in the
silence will God be heard and recognised. For the first time I met with and lived
among men (and later communities of women) for whom prayer was a way of life.
That was a complete eye opener. Prayer was not simply something one did. It was
something one was or could become. As a result I have kept my links with
Benedictine communities very strong, returning there - especially to French
monasteries - as often as I can, and taking groups of people, young and old with
me.

The other tipping point in my prayer evolution was I am sure linked to my
discovery of the Benedictine life. It was when I was a curate in Stepney, in
London’s east end. I was still praying with my shopping list - indeed my shopping
list approach proved a useful way both of recapitulating the day and preparing for
the next day. I am glad that note book in hand I remembered the people I had
visited that day at home or in hospital, the young who had visited my flat for
coffee and confirmation class, the boring PCC meetings or the equally riveting
Deanery Synod!

But at last I did begin to ask myself - is this what prayer is about? Is prayer a
shopping list of requests? And what happens when, as in Gwen Raverat’s case, it
doesn’t seem to work? Would I give up in a ‘final frenzy of despair’? Is prayer just
a bad idea? I think it was probably a combination of the Benedictine model which
had taken such a hold on my imagination, and working with Bishop Trevor who as
well as being a bishop (probably the most celebrated bishop in the church at the
time) was also a monk (a member of the Community of the Resurrection) I knew
that before he said Mass every day in his chapel he spent an hour or two on his
knees before the Blessed Sacrament in silent adoration. In my preparation for my
Lazard Scholarship visit to french monasteries I had read Geoffrey Moorhouse’s
book on contemporary monastic life Beyond All Reason - and there he described
the lives of members of the Little Brothers of Jesus, who before they went off to
their work as factory workers, or bus drivers, would also spend an hour before the
sacrament in silent adoration. Could it be that that was where prayer began? Not
with my agenda, my ambitious programme, my daily worries and aspirations?
Could it be that prayer begins with God - in and for himself - not as the
providential benefactor beyond our sight who might (or might not) answer the
prayers I so urgently presented; but as the source of all that is: the ground of our
being : from whom all we are and all we have derive, and to whom we shall return?
Could prayer lie not in words at all, with their peremptory demands, but with a
waiting and a listening - waiting on God? The priest poet RS Thomas had
something to say about this in his poem Kneeling.

Moments of great calm
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak: the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acte
A great role. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits, waiting as I,
For the message.
Prompt me God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

In our fourth session I will return to this theme of waiting and listening - to
contemplative silence as the beginning of prayer. However silence is not the usual
place for us to start an exploration of prayer. Prayers usually involve words,
concepts, talking, articulation. Open a prayer book and you are confronted with
words. No wonder Mrs Moore in EM Forster’s novel A Passage to India refers to
‘poor, little, talkative, Christianity’ full of empty rhetoric. RS Thomas talked about
a ‘staircase for silence’ but it seems not to be a staircase most Christians have
ascended in their spiritual quest. I shall as I say be thinking about silence in our last
session, but before we leave words let us think about them (as we shall in other
sessions think about music and painting) as stimulants to our imagination. I have
already quoted poetry as a positive influence in our understanding of prayer. Not
all words are ‘talkative’ or ‘argumentative’. Sometimes words kindle the
imagination, broaden our horizons, lift our hearts and minds to another world and
indeed bring us to a place of utter intimacy, integration and peace.

Words, I shall later be suggesting is not where prayer starts or ought to start - we
need to practice contemplation. But nevertheless we have probably been formed
in our praying by words more than anything. Those of us who are Anglicans have
inherited a liturgical tradition crafted by a martyred Archbishop of Canterbury,
Thomas Cranmer, whose sense of rhythm, assonance, repetition and cadence,
allied with his understanding of the power of language, created a liturgical
tradition which, alongside the King James version of the bible, has shaped our
prayer and our understanding of God. And that tradition - even though the Book
of Common Prayer may have been superseded by other liturgical developments -
has informed the thinking and the liturgical intelligence and the prayer-crafting of
another generation of liturgists. Some of Cranmer’s collects are amongst the finest
prayers ever written in English, and Coverdale’s translation of the psalms is
peerless in its poetic sensibility.

The choristers in our English and Welsh cathedrals may not know it, but every
evening as they sing the psalms, they are being exposed to one of the oldest
literary texts in the world, and in their English translation, one of the most
beautiful. And because they repeat at least the evening psalms so often, the texts
become part of their spiritual repertoire for life. Their inner life - indeed our inner
life - is being shaped by poetry written 3,000 years ago, which still retains its
wisdom and power. Thanks to my own days as a cathedral chorister, when I go to
visit someone in hospital, and they ask me to pray with them, I have an anthology
of prayers to draw on, which I carry in my memory. Because it so powerfully
conveys the ever-constant, never-to-be-escaped presence of God, psalm 139
comes often to mind:

O God thou hast searched me out and known me…..

The words of the liturgy - not just the psalms - shape our life of prayer (and this
aspect of public worship in relation to personal prayer is considered in chapter ?).
Liturgical prayer is ‘common’ prayer - something we have in common with others,
something that we share. For Anglicans the phrase common as in The Book of
Common Prayer, or its successor Common Worship is freighted with meaning.
Thomas Cranmer’s genius in conflating the monastic Hours into the the offices of
morning and evening prayer, in simplifying the rubrics and complexity of the
liturgy, and most of all in translating the prayers and Mass of the Latin Sarum Use
into memorable and beautiful English prose, created prayers that all could use
together - not just the priests but the ‘common’ people too. And because of this
common usage the prayers of the liturgy became part of the personal prayer of
individual Christians. They knew about penitence and praise and thanksgiving,
because week by week the liturgy gave them the words to express these emotions
in addressing God.

And the words of Cranmer in his Prayer Books inevitably shaped the prayer and
the poetry of the finest poets in the English language - as well as the prayer of
ordinary men and women. Cranmer was martyred under Mary Tudor in 1556 :
William Shakespeare was born in 1564. As Shakespeare was growing up in
Stratford-upon-Avon, having been baptised in the parish church there and
attending that church week by week, he too would have been shaped by prayer in
English crafted by Cranmer - even though his mother at least was brought up in
the old Catholic obedience. And although the King James version of the bible was
not authorised until 1611 (just a few years before Shakespeare’s death) he would
almost daily have absorbed the cadences of Tyndale’s bible in English which was
the forerunner of the 1611 version.

Not only Shakespeare, but John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan,
Thomas Traherne and John Milton and so many other poets from this golden age
of English letters were not just influenced but shaped by Cranmer’s prayers and
the Authorised Version of the bible, and their imagination was kindled and their
own words honed by the words and phrases of these formative texts. It is not
simply that Shakespeare for example refers in his plays to 42 books in the bible, or
that at a conservative tally he makes well over a thousand biblical references, it is
that the stories of the bible and the phrases of the prayer book stirred up an
imaginative stream in the literary consciousness of generations of writers - in the
way that Greek and Roman myths and legends had done in the past.
But the traffic is not all one way. Many books have been written on the influence
of the prayer book and King James Version on the literary culture of Britain (not
just England) in the seventeenth and succeeding centuries. But it worked the other
way as well. Our prayer has been illuminated, extended deepened and made vivid
by poets, novelists and playwrights. And the quality they bring to our spiritual
awareness is that of imagination. And it’s this quality of imagination I most want
to talk about in relation to prayer.

In the following talks I shall be discussing music and painting in relation to prayer
and our final session will be devoted to prayer and silence, and today’s talk
concerns the imaginative power of words. Of course the Word is a two edged
sword. Words I want to suggest can release and stimulate the imagination. But very
often words are used (especially in a religious context) to stifle imagination. And as
we shall see religiously motivated authorities have burned books, destroyed
paintings and statuary, and circumscribed the potential of musicians precisely
because they, following in the steps of no less an authority than St Augustine of
Hippo, have been wary of the power of the imagination.

Words of course have often been used in religious contexts to define, pin down,
control and prescribe. The Word of God - made flesh and dwelling among us -
has been released into our midst for us to cradle and nourish and be nourished by.
And what does ‘poor, little, talkative Christianity’ do? It overwhelms the Word of
God with its own more important, hectoring, moralising words. And the bible, for
example, which should be for us, as it was for Shakespeare and generations of
English poets, a source of inspiration, profound wisdom and a clue to how we
might live life in preparation for heaven - the bible has become all too often a
series of moralising slogans - captured by words ; not released by The Word.

Often it is our creative artists, whether they share our faith or not, who in their
pursuit of truth, in their vision of our humanity and our world as it is and as it
might be, reveal our faith to us again, with freshness and new insight and
challenge. Their own imagination has been kindled in their pursuit of ‘whatever is
true, honourable, just and pure; by whatever is lovely and commendable’ (Phil 4,8)
and they in their turn have through their artistry and truthfulness kindled our
imagination - and so helped us to pray.

In developing this theme and supporting the thesis I have proposed I could begin
with the novels of Iris Murdoch or Barbara Kingsolver; or the plays of Peter
Schaffer or David Hare; or the work of any number of poets and past and present
to illustrate my point - that if we want to enter more deeply into the spiritual
experience, indeed if we want to learn anything at all beyond the surface of
religious knowledge then our imagination needs to be kindled. And sometimes
words (despite their limitations to which I have alluded) in the hands of an
imaginative intelligence can do just that. The imagination, clarifying the vision of
the creative artist, both precipitates us into the world as it is, and at the same time
reveals to us something we never knew, or had never seen or heard before, or had
never recognised or acknowledged. And at the same time the creative artist
provides us with somewhere to stand, to observe and absorb these two aspects of
creative dialectic - of seeing the world as it is and as it might be. That is what the
imagination contributes to our human consciousness and therefore to our spiritual
awareness. and more specifically to our life of prayer. The artist gives us
somewhere to sit or stand or kneel - in a place often of wonder - where we can
contemplate the world as it is and as it might be.

And God? Where is God in that process of revelation. Sometimes the divine is
specifically invoked - and the biblical narrative and the grammar of Christian
spirituality continues to provide the vocabulary even for the most secular of
creative commentators. But as we shall see the divine is not always invoked - or at
least not directly. Not all art is good of course, and not all art is truthful. But the
imagination of the great creative artists - whatever their medium and despite (or
because of) the inevitable flaws in their work - is leading us into truth. And I find
great encouragement in the words of the great twentieth century spiritual writer,
Simone Weil who wrote:

It seemed to me certain that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure
regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to himself, because before being Christ, he is
truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into
his arms.

So with Simone Weil’s authority let us look at three poems which might lead us
into the world of imagination. The first poem is by the early seventeenth century
priest poet George Herbert, who turned his back on a promising academic career
at Cambridge, where he was public orator and who also spurned a glittering life at
court, despite his aristocratic credentials. He preferred to take the parson’s gown
and for three short years, until his death in 1633, became the priest of Fugglestone
with Bemerton just beyond Salisbury, where he wrote most of the poems for
which he is justly renowned. This poem is appropriately called Prayer.

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

The poem ends with the phrase ‘Something understood’ in a typical Herbertian
resolution, as though we have arrived somewhere - though what has been
understood is never quite made clear! I described my early approach to saying
prayers as ‘a shopping list’. What Herbert offers us here is a shopping list, rather
like my juvenile prayers. Perhaps that is the point. Herbert’s poem is a list of things
that come to Herbert’s mind as he scans the world around him. There are, as you
might expect in a poem entitled prayer, some religious references - references to
the passion for example as he relates prayer to the intercession that Christ offers
on the cross: ‘Christ side-piercing spear’ with its typical Herbertian ambiguity and
condensing of ideas in a well-turned phrase. For the spear that pierced Christ’s
side recounted in St John’s gospel, brought forth blood and water - often
interpreted as divinity and humanity flowing together from the blood stream of
the dying Christ. Prayer releases that saving stream. But prayer is also the spear
that causes Christ’s dying agony. As though prayer, our prayer is caught up in the
world’s sin as well as its redemption.

I could take every phrase in this finely wrought sonnet and subject it to that close
analysis and so many ideas pour forth. Take ‘exalted manna’ for example - a
somewhat subversive phrase since it is a reference to the eucharistic host for which
manna (referred to in the Book of Exodus as food for God’s people) provides the
original type. But here it is also referencing the host raised (exalted) by the priest at
communion - or would have been raised by the priest until the Cranmerian
restrictions on the appropriate manual acts performed by the priest during the
celebration of the sacrament were imposed. The poet scans the horizon of the
rapidly expanding known universe ‘the milky way’, ‘the land of spices’, ‘church
bells beyond the stars’, - as though prayer might provide the connection between
earth and heaven, feed our deepest needs and sustain our journey through life:

‘soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage’

and there is a moment in the poem where the jumble and clamour of competing
images finds some repose:

‘softness and peace and joy and love and bliss’

This poem is beautifully metrical, rhythmical and rhymed in the most English of
ordered verse forms - the sonnet. But for all its order and meticulous crafting and
deeper meanings, it is a shopping list. And it is intended to be, reminding us of St
Paul when he talks of prayer:

The Spirit helps us in our weakness: for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit
himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words, making sense of our incoherent
groanings’ (Romans 8 v26)

It would be going too far to describe George Herbert’s Prayer as incoherent
groanings, but is he justified in ending his sonnet with the words ‘something
understood’? It is a shopping list after all - however well-crafted.

It is also the only poem I know in the English language that does not have a main
verb. And maybe that is Herbert’s point. This is a poem about prayer without a
main verb. As though the poet’s prayer - though the poet is himself the user of
words par excellence - is waiting for the verb to be supplied to make sense of the
shopping list. The verbum (Latin for the Word) the Word of God, made flesh and
dwelling among us, is the one thing needed to make sense of our inarticulate
groaning. That is why George Herbert can end his poem with the phrase
‘Something understood’. The penny has dropped.

This poem is not a prayer - despite its title (though many Herbert poems can be
used as prayers). But by the carefully contrived incompleteness of his sonnet, by
the myriad of images drawn from all quarters of the known world, by the
imagination he expends himself and then evokes from the reader, by demanding
thought and engagement in deciphering his shopping list he illuminates the
process and substance of prayer itself. We find we have been taken beyond a
shopping list approach to prayer by this shopping list approach to prayer!

Some two hundred and fifty years after George Herbert another priest poet
emerged who, had his poetry been published in his lifetime, rather than thirty years
after his death in 1889, the whole course of English poetry in the twentieth
century might well have been very different. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit
priest who spent some years at the Jesuit house at St Beuno’s in North Wales near
St Asaph. there he wrote many of his most famous and beautiful poems, including
God’s Grandeur:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

If George Herbert looked out at the world of his day with all its
inventiveness and new discoveries, and religious tribulation and change,
Hopkins looked out on a world of enormous beauty and fragility - especially
in the Elwy Valley where he then lived - the beauty of which was being
destroyed, and whose fragility was being exploited by the advances of science
and rough-shod capitalism. And he relates both the creation of the natural
order and its nineteenth century desecration to the biblical myths of creation
and fall.

In the opening octet we have the vision of God’s creation - flaming, shining
shaking, gathering, oozing, crushed - described in a series of energetic verbs.
And against this vision of divine creativity is placed human pedestrianism,
conveyed in the repeated, ‘have trod, have trod, have trod.’ In contrast to the
life-creating range of the divine activity human kind is ‘seared’, ‘bleared’ and
‘smeared’, and smudge and smell describe the fallen condition of humanity.
And so desensitised have men and women become to God’s grandeur that we
cannot even feel the extent of our own destructiveness - ‘nor can foot feel
being shod’. This poem written in the late nineteenth century, and published
at the end of the Great War, is a poem for our own day when ecological
issues become ever more pressing.

As a work of creative imagination this beautifully crafted poem offers
insights into the world we inhabit with all its beauty and fragility, and also
reveals the human capacity to exploit and abuse the paradise we have been
given. And Hopkins relates this to the primeval human capacity to disobey
God’s will for us, from the beginning of time. But the sonnet doesn’t end
there. Hopkins sees the capacity of the natural world to revive and survive.
‘For all this, nature is never spent/ There lives the dearest freshness deep
down things’. He is describing nature in its daily re-awakening, as he watches
dawn break in the Elwy Valley. But through the description of nature he
follows the nature trail more deeply and finds God himself revealed. In the
final part of the poem the natural world is infused with a sense of the Holy
Trinity. If we have a picture - as we have already observed - of the creating
God, the Father, in the first eight lines, displaying his grandeur, then in this
last section we find the death and resurrection of Jesus re-awakening us to
new hope and the promise of paradise.

‘And though the last lights off the black west went’
is an almost uncanny premonition of Edward Gray’s words as he watched the
lamplighters from his rooms in Downing Street and recognised as the world
tumbled into war in 1914 ‘that the lights are going out all over Europe’. Here
Hopkins recognises the even greater event of Calvary and the death of Jesus
as the sun disappears in the west. And then the line
‘Oh, morning, at the brown brink, eastward springs’
is a reference both to the daily miracle of sun rise and to the Easter dawn of
the resurrection.

The final couplet
‘Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings’
recognises that though this world is still a bent world, it is a redeemed world,
because the Holy Ghost broods over it. The Holy Ghost seen not simply in
traditional Christian iconography as a dove of peace, but as the hen who like
Jesus himself longs to gather her chicks to her, and further the warm breast
suggests the pelican in her piety who according to legend plucked her own
breast to feed her young - as Christ sacramentally feeds us, despite our
‘bentness’.

This again isn’t a prayer: it’s a poem. But it engages our intelligence, it kindles
our imagination, it gives us a place to sit or stand, to consider the poles of
our human predicament - the world as it is and the world as it might be, by
God’s grace. And the bright wings of this poem brings us to a place of
tranquility, a place of contemplation. When I read this poem I am brought to
a place of silence. That has a lot to do with prayer.

The third poem in this series of words that bring us to prayer is, like George
Herbert’s poem, called Prayer. Carol Ann Duffy is the poet laureate and was
made a DBE in the 2015 honours list. Despite being brought up as a Roman
Catholic and attending a Catholic school (maybe because of these
circumstances) she is not a Christian believer, but as is so often the case those
who do not believe or can’t cope with our religion with all its collusions and
compromises often reveal to us truths about our religion and the practice of
it that have either eluded us or we have chosen to ignore.

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

This poem evokes for me rather nostalgically the sights and sounds of my childhood. If
this poem is about prayer as I believe it profoundly to be, then it locates prayer within
the ordinary, the places which ordinary people inhabit, with the smells, sights, sounds
and memories of every day life. The idea of a ‘sudden gift’ in the midst of the humdrum
as a woman lifts herself from despair and has a vision of something better and brighter
- that sudden gift is a feature of prayer, as is the painful truth (‘that small, familiar pain’)
we would sooner avoid. Then something as ordinary as a train passing recalls a halfforgotten
memory: evoking perhaps the certainties of liturgical prayer (‘distant Latin
chanting’) even while all else is in flux.

‘Pray for us now’… there in the middle of the poem, a sense that we can’t pray, and we
need the prayerful companionship of others, not least that of the saints. For this is a
fragment of prayer taken from the most used of Catholic prayers:

Hail Mary, full of grace….
Holy Mary Mother of God
pray for us now….and at the hour of our death.

Meanwhile life goes on around us providing the substance of our prayer through its
very humdrumness - listening to next door’s child rehearsing piano scales, or hearing
another child who is called in from playing - perhaps suggesting the adult who in the act
of calling his or her child’s name, is remembering their own lost childhood. And the
poem ends with that most ordinary of daily occurrences, the shipping forecast for
inshore waters - part of the prayerful regularity that the radio provides.

Darkness outside: inside the radio’s prayer.
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finnisterre

God isn’t mentioned in this poem. Perhaps this is a recognition that prayer doesn’t
necessarily or always spring from within a confession of faith, within a system of belief,
or within a community of believers (despite the pray for us now). Maybe prayer arises for
us all at a point of need, a moment of extremis, when our resources run out. As the
first of the Beatitudes puts it in the New English Bible, Blessed are those who know
their need of God. Out of our need prayer is uttered, whether we are believers or not -
and the God who knows our need before we ask responds to our incoherent
murmurings.
​
One final thing about Carol Ann Duffy’s poem. On first reading it I thought what a trite
way to end a poem - rhyming prayer with Finisterre. Until it dawned on me that Finisterre
does not just provide a convenient rhyme. Like ‘something understood’ it provides a
profound truth. That prayer, - needy and incoherent though it almost certainly will be,
and redolent of everyday, sights, sounds and smells - takes us to finis terre, to the ends of
the earth - and beyond. And maybe prayer takes us to the place where this chapter
began, to the Moslem Mohamedou in Guantanimo Bay, ‘praying in his heart’.
‘Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me’.

What are you doing for Lent? If someone asks you that, you know pretty much what they are expecting you to say - that just like last year you are going without sugar in your tea, without cake, without chocolate or even without alcohol! And why do we do it? Well the intention is surely in some way to embrace sacrifice and so identify with our Lord in his great sacrifice. But the leap of imagination from chocolate cake to Calvary is a really hard one to make.

The season of Lent coincides with spring and the wordLent may be related to the lengthening of the days at this time. So it is said that Lent is the springtime of the Church - its season of growth. So, doing something for Lent ought really to be about our growth as Christians into deeper faith and fuller Christian maturity. And how do we do this?

There is a model of Christian life in the Acts of the Apostles that is as fresh and relevant today as ever, and which we might reflect on through the days and weeks of Lent. ‘They continued in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers. A sense of awe was everywhere' (Acts 2.42).  

Here are four areas where we might make some progress this Lent. First, we renew our understanding of theteaching of the apostles by reading the scriptures, reflecting on how we understand faith and the profound truths that have been handed on to us. We might choose a good Lent book to study - the clergy are happy to offer suggestions.

Then comes the fellowship which means our engagement in the Christian community, and also perhaps the communities where we live and work.  For the Christian, love for God means also love for our neighbour. This means that we can grow in love for God by being more loving to our neighbour. Dag Hammarskjold, a former Secretary General of the United Nations, said that,In our age, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.

And thirdly, the breaking of bread. Clearly the Mass was central to the life of the earliest Christians and it is central to ours as well. In this extraordinary ordinary action we come into the place where Jesus stands and where he fills us with his presence. And through this sacrament, given to us on the night before he died, we not only receive Christ’s Body and Blood, we also receive his commission to be the vehicles of his loving presence in the world today. As we grow into a deeper understanding of the Mass we will find that faith takes root in our lives, and strengthens us to share that faith with others.

And finally, the prayers. Whatever else we may say about the Christian life, it is a life of prayer. And prayer takes time. There are plenty of aids to prayer, from formal structures we can use in church or at home, rosary beads we can carry with us through the day, or times spent alone when we discover the profound prayer of silence. Again, do ask the clergy if you would like some help with prayer - there is so much available to help us.

Throughout Lent at St Matthew’s we shall be exploring the theme of Commitment, and this one verse provides a wonderful framework for our reflection.

May we allow this Lent truly to be a springtime of faith for all of us - a season of growth. May we be inspired by the scriptures, spurred to greater love of one another, nourished by the Eucharist and sustained by prayer. So may we discover, as did the first disciples, that ‘a sense of awe was everywhere.’

With all good wishes
Fr Philip Chester
Vicar of St Matthew's

One day of the year that I always mark with modest celebration is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, which occurred last Thursday. For us in the Northern Hemisphere, Christmas is a midwinter feast, a time when the days grow a little longer and light and warmth return slowly return to the earth. Light is mentioned again and again in today’s liturgy. On one of the darkest days of the year, light explodes all around us. The sun is sneaking back. A marvellous resonance with the gospel.

For those who live in the Southern Hemisphere, however, it is the beginning of summer. School is over. It is a time for long holidays for rest and relaxation. For them Christmas marks not the shortest day of the year but the longest. We may think it strange to celebrate Christmas on the beach, but this great festival is so rich in symbolism that wherever it is celebrated there is always something new that can be grasped from the profound truths at the heart of the Christmas message. 

Do we go away to celebrate? Then so did the Holy Family. Do we gather at home with our family? So did all the angels gather round the stable in Bethlehem and make it their home. Are there just two or three of us together (at the most)? So we know that wherever two or three are gathered together the Holy Family is with them. 

Is Christmas lonely and painful because of those we have lost? There is still room for us in the stable if not in the inn. A festival of peace, of gifts, of light, of love, of hope, of warmth. It is very difficult to find a Christian theme which does not fit into the celebration of the birth of Christ. So let us rejoice, because Christmas fits in everywhere, with universal application. For the truth remains that God comes among us in the person of Christ, and our lives are for ever changed. 

... an opportunity to shop with a vengeance but without the guilt? Spending money we don’t have – and pay it off for another ten years? Giving in, and fulfilling the kids’ demands to receive the same iPhone as their friends at school?

What are we supposed to be waiting for?

... And they rumble and rumble. And wolf asked “What is rumbling in my stomach so much?” Of course no answer was given. Then he drank from the well, fell down and drowned.

Clearly the wolf had nothing to keep him afloat. What about you and me?

At the moment I am struggling health-wise, and I feel very much like the wolf in the story of Little Red Riding Hood. However there is a profound difference: I have lots to buoy me up. I have some friends who care deeply, pray for me and keep in contact. Unlike a friend of mine, who drank a bottle of Holy Water secretly and replaced it with ordinary water when he was a child, I even officially get Holy Water to sip! How wonderful!

With my health not being what I would like it to be I think a lot about my body, what I put into it, what I ask of it and how much rest it gets. I have never done that sooo religiously, I can assure you. That is something else that keeps me afloat – taking care to eat and drink things that don’t harm me. And I have to be a doubly fast learner these days just to keep afloat and, if not running, at least walking.

At the St Matthew's Revue in May 2013, Fr Peter Hanaway and Jane Kennedy recited this fascinating account of the first vicar of St Matthew's based on the painstaking and scholarly research Jane has been undertaking about the early days of life in and around St Matthew's. You can find more information about her research on the St Matthew's history website.

Saint George is the patron saint of England - but actually he wasn't English at all. His story is so steeped in myth and legend that it is virtually impossible to separate fact and fiction. The followers would write up fabulous accounts of his life, and so improving St George's reputation, but that did nothing to enlighten us about his real life. Apparently he was born in an area which is now in Turkey. Legend tells us that his parents were Christian. He became a Roman soldier but protested against Rome's persecution of Christians. As a result St George was imprisoned and tortured, but he stayed true to his faith and was beheaded.

He is not only the patron saint of England but also of many other countries and places in the world. He looks after a wide ranging array of professions too. The flag of Saint George - a red cross on a white background - is part of the Union Jack.