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.
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.
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