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One of the pressures faced in workaday life is to provide a calm, assured presence which bespeaks being in control, knowing what’s happening and being prepared for whatever eventuality. A veneer of competence and unruffled professionalism. Bit like a swan. One of my concerns with this stance is that I wonder how open we are to change and development when we position ourselves like that for too long. We can become victims of our own propaganda, so much so that we assume we do know what’s going on and how to respond, deafening ourselves by degrees to disturbing new possibilities and failing to attend to what’s provocatively vital in order to grow. The classic example biblically would I guess be the religious leaders response to Jesus. So how do we avoid hardening into ultra-competent but stunted beings? One thought is by being willing to admit we’re lost more often than we do.

In the middle of the road of my life

I awoke in a dark wood

Where the way was wholly lost.

That’s Dante’s first line in the Divine Comedy according to one translation  – lostness is the beginning of the journey for Dante to heaven, and there’s a waking up to lostness which means a fresh start has been made. Recognising lostness is thus  a mark of spiritual movement! And isn’t it the case that following our path must mean going off the path if it is genuinely to be our path? This makes sense of experience too – the moments when we’ve been genuinely at sea, in terms of relationship breakdown, career crisis, health issues…. these moments of lostness which are awful at the time might nevertheless be seen, looking back, as times of discovery which we wouldn’t give up for all the world.

I suppose all of this shouldn’t really be surprising – the Judeo-Christian scriptures indicate that God does some of his best work with people who are lost in one way or another. The problem isn’t being lost, it’s pretending we’re not. Once we’ve admitted it we’re open to re-direction and expansion. And Dante has a lot to say about that too, but I guess that’s for another day.

Just reading Lucy Winkett’s Our sound is our wound after the Leicester Diocesan clergy conference – lovely reminder of the sculpture in the cathedral in Florence by Luca Della Robbia (in 1431) based on Psalm 150 which we reflected on at the conference. The sculpture has a series of glad cherubs or children playing instruments, dancing or singing – and Lucy puts this next to the passage on how we are to be living stones of the temple (1 Peter 2.4), suggesting from the interpretation of the sculpture that we’re not plonked there as statuesque building cubes but dancing. Building on this idea(!), it fits with the sense of being invited into the dancing (ie perichoresis – earliest description of life of Trinity) of God … or as one saint (I forget who) put it, “the Christian life is about falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up …but all the while, dancing.” And of course to relate as dancers or musicians suggests first and foremost that, like the angels, it’s not about domination or oppression but giving way to one another to make a beautiful unity (Isaiah 6.3, Rev 7.11,12).

St.Seraphim of Sarov (1759 – 1833) – got to be one of my favourite saints – celebrated today. Apart from amazing humility, his love and compassion for people stands as a remarkably different starting point to the popular starting point of having expectations of others, expectations so often frustrated and so easily causing irritation, anger and impatience.  The inevitability of us not meeting expectations all the time and our human fragility should be a cause for compassion – St. Seraphim understood this profoundly and replaced expectations with compassion and love, becoming like a child in his trustful and unquestioning acceptance of everyone.  Christ himself says, “Assuredly I say to you; unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matt18:3). Of course Seraphim could be charged with naivity and indulgence in all this, but to those who recognised God’s grace here and sought to follow the way of faith Seraphim was also a challenging and no-nonsense spiritual guide.

 Among his sayings are “the aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit” and “there is nothing that so blocks the work of the Holy Spirit as despondency”.

Put those together and it suggests the importance and spirit-filled nature of hope in the Christian life (Heb 11.1), a hope which, if authentic, means life is lived differently. Archbish’ Rowan says in his New Year’s message that we are not to lose hope in the possibility of change….and presumably that means we’re called to enact such hope in our lives.  Mary C.Grey sees this enacted in the ‘graced actions of ordinary people’ which ‘embody the hope of the coming Kingdom’, and Ann Morisy goes further to suggest these are the kinds of actions that dare to defy our regular assumptions of scarcity and threat (see her Bothered and Bewildered).

So what might such actions look like? I guess in a situation of trouble and dismay, an act of generosity and kindness to another for example…such as is consistently seen in the remarkable generosity of some of the ‘poorest’ people we know. Or in a situation of blame and acrimony, shouldering responsibility in order to shelter another, such as we see in our best ‘bosses’. Or in times of fear and the attendant temptations to violence and rigidity, an openness to God’s movement from the strangest of places, such as we experience in those holy ones who treat us as angels, just in case, Heb 13.2. Hopeful actions, rooted in the ‘assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’, Heb 11.1.

In such ways (and no doubt many others) it seems hope is enacted, despondency rejected and the Holy Spirit according to Seraphim allowed to flow.

The happy angel on the left in the picture is Gabriel, found at the front of Rheims Cathedral in France. There is another laughing angel, l’ange du sourire, on the left front door.

And why not? The angels are said to be rejoicing and presumably joy includes laughter. Laughter is also a great way to alleviate anxiety – so it goes with their message “do not be afraid”.

Reflecting on this in the light of lots of laughter this Christmastide, and the sense of the appropriate fit of that mood to the season. A season devoted to laughter – not mindless hedonism but laughter which is able to see some of its own absurdity, savour company and relax into the giftedness celebrated at Christmas. Why underplay this attractive, life-giving, anxiety-reducing, relationship-building dimension?

And what’s more, in that laughter of the angels maybe there’s an undercurrent  of laughter at the existing powers, and it seems historically that laughing at the powers and principalities is a pretty effective way of loosening their oppressive grip.

There are other pointers to laughter’s significance in the Christian tradition….

When Dante gets to Paradise in the Divine Comedy what does he hear after trials and tribulations? Angels laughing and praising the Trinity. (Isn’t the thought of joining a vibrant living room full of laughter somewhat more attractive than being ushered in to sit on the back pew of an everlasting service?) While in Hell there’s no hope or laughter for Dante, and in Purgatory there’s hope but no laughter, in heaven there’s no need of hope and laughter is the order of the day!

Or take St.Catherine of Siena. Her biographer tells of how she spent three years enclosed in her room, often besieged by doubts, demonic visions and taunting voices until she finally banished them with……you guessed it, laughter! Immediately Christ appeared to her; “And where were you when all this was happening?” she asked reproachfully. “I was in your heart,” came the reply.

A presence released and realized by laughter.

We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity… But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.

 That’s Meister Eckhart – and it seems to me his point is frequently made in Christmas sermons, but often the question it begs is left unanswered – namely, HOW then can it take place in me?

 This is where Mary seems important – as the Orthodox say, ‘Mary is humanity’s ‘Yes’ to God, and the Cross is humanity’s ‘No’ to God’. Mary is the one who let’s this take place in her, literally and metaphorically allowing the Word to take flesh in her.

 So much to learn from Mary in terms of enabling this to happen – courage, joy, freedom, and lots of other intentional characteristics to reflect. But the one that seems most often spoken of is her ‘obedient listening’. 

 But again I wonder if this is sufficiently precise? I wonder if it’s a sharper kind of listening, not least listening especially attentively to that (in scripture and in life) which threatens to knocks us off balance, receptive to that which questions us in disturbing but compelling ways, alert in the moment of being undone to knowing ourselves to be fiercely loved and on the road to life?…Imaginative and brave listening to that which calls for re-direction and a slow and daunting journey of losing and finding. 

 How can it take place? Not without labour, pain and serious birth-pangs…all of which looking back will it seems turn out to have been grace growing life.

Looking back at 2009, some words that have spoken to me;

“Smile, breathe, slow down”.    Thich Nhat Hanh

“Lose your primary entanglement with agonizing beauties of the natural world, and you need tremendous lashings of power and money to make up for it”.     David Whyte

“God is not someone else”.     Thomas Merton

“As soon as Christians come together they begin to classify and judge and condemn each other. There is only one solution to this dynamic which begins so naturally and so inevitably. That solution is service”.     J. Lewis-Anthony

“I knew a parish once whose whole life depended on the silent prayers of an old woman”.       P.Maury

 Still chewing over that quote about how in the end we are saved by that which ignores us and came across the poet Rilke’s creative re-working of the idea of seeing our lives as a piece of music;

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,

In which you see me hurrying.

Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;

I am only one of my many mouths

And at that, the one that will be the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,

Which are somehow always in discord

Because death’s note wants to climb over –

 But in the dark interval, reconciled,

 They stay there trembling.

                    And the song goes on, beautiful.

 Nice! The poet David Whyte looks at this poem as challenging us not to identify our lives with the notes, especially the ‘triumphant notes’, but as a whole, the music arising from the silence and the sounds taken together, as chaos and order constantly in tension and being sometimes resolved and often-times unresolved.

 Like that too, but I reckon Rilke’s imagery could also apply to how the stuff that’s ignored and ignores us, the silence (or ‘dark interval’) between the ‘notes’ of our agendas, might actually be what enables the notes to come together as music in the way they do, make the notes ‘sound’ differently. Without the silences, the gaps, the non-notes, the notes would just be so much noise. Maybe there needs to a rhythm then where the music arises out of sound & silence felt as a living whole, a rhythm which pays attention to what we need to do but also finds a space to be quite apart from that…..’to care and not to care’ in T.S.Eliot’s words. Maybe our wholeness depends on looking at our lives not as a series of notes but a sculpting of silence with sound, a carving of music in and out of silence, the silence which ‘ignores’ the notes being their ground and foundation.

If the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart is right in claiming ‘there is nothing so like God as silence’ then this ground and foundation has the resonance of the divine about it.

 I think I had better stop, I fear I may have already passed through checkpoint obscurity….

So there I am in the shop queueing up to buy some not-badly-chosen-if-I-say-so-myself Christmas presents, next in the queue, when the assistant turns to someone who has arrived at the counter after me and serves her first. Immediate thought? In all honesty “what the hell are you doing?” Second thought? “Okay, be cool, Christmas spirit, no problem”, and then she does it again with someone who has clearly queued up after me. Amazing how a little thing like that can raise the blood pressure and start the imagination running….”does she know me from somewhere?” “Is this a slight against all men?” “Have I been in here before and is there history?” And there I was, quietly irritated, irritated about being irritated too,  with body language shouting more and more loudly “hello, I’m here, cooey”, leaning in to the counter. Finally I was served, poker faces all round.

 Being ignored – reminded me of a phrase I read recently in Beldon Lane’s excellent book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes – he quotes Andrew Harvey who said “we are saved in the end by the things that ignore us”. When I read that I immediately wanted to argue with it – surely we’re saved, at least in terms of forgiveness and healing etc by being attended to, lovingly and patiently brought to all we might be…in Christ…the opposite of being ignored.

But the more I thought about it, the more it strikes me that the idea of being ignored as part of our salvation contains an important truth. Jesus didn’t ignore people, but he quite often ignored their agendas, answering their questions with an answer to a different question for example. ‘Unanswered prayer’ is often explained in a variety of ways, so how about including the possibility that God might be ignoring some of what we take to be absolutely important? And I guess observing how we are when we’re ignored, if we’re willing to see it, does show the thinness of our tolerance, the weakness of our loyalty, the brittleness of our security, the fragility of our identity. It might also show up the neurotic pursuit of our agendas to shore up a sense of our self-importance and who we are. To let go of some of this baggage might just be salvific according to Harvey’s quote, to realise that what God ignores is much of the flotsam and jetsam we’re obsessed by. Salvation might just be focused on nurturing what is most ourselves, that which for the most part we don’t even see, never mind cultivate.

How do we touch that then, and relate to that which ignores us? Tricky! And as can be seen from above I’m hardly in a position to point the way, and if we’re in the realm of grace we can hardly force it. But I think we can help to the extent of loosening our preoccupation with our own agendas, such as we do when rapt in the quiet attentiveness of contemplation, when gazing on the cross, or when taken out of ourselves by beautiful music, soaring poetry, a breath-taking moment of compassion and no doubt loads more. That which frees us from our own agendas to ground us in a deeper, more solid reality, which speaks of the divine presence.

 So why was I poker-faced in that shop? Maybe I shouldn’t have been..but I’m not quite ready to embrace the assistant and thank her for the opportunity for angelic illumination…. soon hopefully, soon….

Just finished reading The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas – some lovely moments (eg Alain de Botton’s point that it’s always the airline’s first-class desk where the ugliest arguments can be heard) but not a huge amount backing up the “there’s probably no God” line. Simon le Bon’s reflection particularly struck me  – he writes how he lost his faith as he began to wonder what God was, concluding God didn’t have a personality, a brain, can’t think and therefore is probably just existence itself. He says, “when you get to that point, you realise, if that’s what God is, then there’s no such thing”.

I’ve always liked Simon le Bon and Duran Duran, ever since playing the song Girls on Film repeatedly helped me through a bout of flu in December 1981…so respectfully… I wonder if behind Simon’s words lurks the old assumption God must be an object that’s somehow like other objects, ‘made’ of some kind of ‘stuff’. And that’s where it gets weird because God is so odd, God’s not like that. For believers, God isn’t observable like an object. The Creator is not like any thing in the world that’s created.  Does this mean God doesn’t have a personality? I reckon not. For example, the word “person” is related to the Latin “per-sonare” which means “to sound through”. So God can be personal in ‘sounding’ through creation, through the conscience, through Jesus etc. (and the early Christians applied this word ‘person’ to God long before it was applied to humans). The intelligibility of creation suggests to some an intelligent Creator ‘sounding’ through creation, but that doesn’t mean there’s a divine brain-like object pulsating from beyond Neptune.

 God is certainly strange – intelligent but brainless for example! Simon reckons God is not just strange but unbelievable – concluding there is no such thing as God. That’s right! God is no thing – but thoughtful believers don’t think God is a thing either! (And isn’t there much we’ve never clapped eyes on but we believe in, like love, the unconscious, truth, beauty…?)

 There’s loads more to say, but I’ve already committed the cardinal blogging error of too many thoughts in one blog…mea culpa…but it’s interesting how often people come to faith through other people, people through whom God ‘sounds’, people who belong to a world which we want to live in, whose way of being convinces us there’s something real here, and makes us want to drink from the same wells they do, know what they know….believe what they believe.

A few neat links gratefully received recently….

The Bad Vestments blog at http://badvestments.blogspot.com

For liturgical dance connoisseurs there’s the following clip…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh_nqtp3VrU

For ex-rappers turned Anglo-Catholic there’s “Straight outa Compline”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9FoF7HzmEo

And for the lovers of the Old Testament and the music of Queen there’s the story of David and Goliath set remarkably well to Bohemian Rhapsody

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lhr8C1oRtk%26feature=related