A Reading by Carol O'Connor On Wednesday the 16th of June, Carol O’Connor led a Spiritual Reading Group session via Zoom on the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. Four poems were discussed, the third poem being ‘Raptor’. Artwork: Portion of Iso-Mandala 313 by Philip Harvey Raptor by R.S.Thomas You have made God small setting him astride a pipette or a retort studying the bubbles absorbed in an experiment that will come to nothing. I think of him rather as an enormous owl abroad in the shadows brushing me sometimes with his wing so the blood in my veins freezes, able to find his way from one soul to another because he can see in the dark. I have heard him crooning to himself, so that almost I could believe in angels, those feathered overtones in love's rafters, I have heard him scream, too, fastening his talons in his great adversary, or in some lesser denizen, maybe, like you or me. Rowan Williams has been quoted as saying that R.S.Thomas is a ‘great articulator of an uneasy faith.’ An increasing influence on the poet’s writing and thinking is the work of Danish philosopher and theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. God may be glimpsed by a person occasionally in a country church, but is essentially baffling and unknowable. God is wholly other to our human categories of understanding. Raptor is a later poem, published in No Truce with the Furies in 1995. There’s something of this experience of the wholly otherness of God touched on here. This poem makes us feel uncomfortable. It asks us to include aspects of life that we would prefer not to in our conversation about God. The opening six lines form themselves as a ‘retort’ to the reader: to you - who treat God as something or someone we know and feel very familiar with. The reader assumes something about God that is not possible: an entity to break down scientifically, known in a laboratory, able to be tested and measured. The poet plays on the word ‘retort’: being a return argument, a retaliating defensive holding of a position; or, a ‘retort stand’ , equipment or glassware to support scientific equipment. Both meanings imply the reader assumes science experiments and quantifiable measurements will open up to us the nature of God. Articulate this even in measured stanzas. But if we remain true to this task in our absorption, the task becomes really one of ‘bubbles’, effervescent, evaporating, interesting to our attention but ultimately futile. God cannot be measured and is not quantifiable. This is a call to the reader to wake up from this illusion. The poet’s own ‘retort’ or refutation to ‘you’ becomes the premise of the poem. In the first stanza this, he says, is what ‘you’ think of God. But the next three stanzas will turn to what the poet thinks. Turning away from the laboratory he draws on nature as his chosen place to think on God. A place which is never quantifiable in bubbles nor readymade to order. He chooses a metaphor: considering God to be a large bird who can move in the half light, live in the shadows and operate stealthily in the dark. This ‘enormous owl’ has no inclination to lie astride instruments in a laboratory, but flies ‘abroad’ in the night. It is a living creature whose enormity defies the smallness of being grounded inside a pipette. It can’t be objectified, but neither one whose presence can be denied: sometimes it physically touches the poet with its wing. And then the poet’s ‘blood freezes.’ The brush of feathers may be ever so gentle, but the physical response is immediate and dramatic. The Owl has the capacity to visit ‘one soul to another’ amongst all of us. It is never still for long. Its presence can cause our very self to stop and feel aghast. Rather than retracting this sense of unease and discomfort the poet pushes the point further in stanza 3. This is a God whose very language is a weird inaccessible ‘crooning.’ It sings in a soft low voice to itself - its own strange tunes are unintelligible to humans; a God whose words are secret, keeping its own counsel. A capricious God too, who without warning, can turn violent, flinging itself down with a ‘scream’ to ‘fasten its talons’ into its opponent. Is this a mighty act on the part of the Owl against some great enemy? Are we the ‘denizen’ whereby our own spiritual territory unaccountably and suddenly invaded and violated? Are these talons for rescue or consumption? There is a fascination with violence and cruelty which runs through this poem and is projected onto God. If we can’t examine God under a microscope is this the sort of God we end up inviting in? If we can’t control God, are we then vulnerable to sudden predatory attack? If we can’t pin down God with our mind under a microscope then we risk being pinned down by God in our emotional response of terror? But R.S.Thomas is being honest in his perception that for him God can be complicit and involved in cruelty in the world. We live in a world where natural disasters, violence and suffering happen for no apparent reason. How do we begin to reconcile ourselves with this phenomenon? We each have to come to terms with violence in the world in our own way. So on one level we can read this poem as a wrestling with the notion of a God who chooses not only to be complicit in but an active agent of violence in nature and human disaster. There is good precedent for this wrestling state of soul in our Christian scriptures: the prophets, the psalmist, Jesus’ ‘haunting cry’ on the cross. There is permission in our Christian history of language about God to explore these darker instincts. But there’s more. The poet shows us that if we choose to engage with the process of understanding God as a metaphor rather than investigation under a microscope then we are changing the very premise in our discourse about the nature of God. Something else is understood to be at work here and we have to invite it in to our language. For a start we surrender control. No longer the scientist in control of the experiment, we enter a territory in which mystery and unknown pathways are acknowledged. We have to learn to see differently. And to speak what we see differently. The territory involves owning our emotions, imagination and intuition. There is quite a range being expressed: feelings of wonder and awe at an ‘enormous owl abroad in the shadows’, at ‘angels in love’s rafters.’ The poem is full of soft sibilant sounds which at times give the effect of tenderness. But there is also the terror, ‘the blood in the vein freezes,’ the owl’s scream in fastening his talons. Feelings and intuitions may not be at all comfortable nor welcome, but that doesn’t make them less credible. In fact, underlying the poem is the understanding that in reckoning with pain, suffering and violence we have to bring these responses into play. In doing this the reckoning now has its own language and expression. And we, as free agents not studying scientists, now are able to recognise and credit not only the sinister ‘croon’ but also legitimise the presence of angels and hear their overtones, for their voices in ‘love’s rafters’ though unknowable are still valid. What we are receiving in these three stanzas is not a cut and hang out to dry God, but something much bigger, deeper, richer. By employing our whole range of perceptions, thoughts and feelings about God we are loosened into a new understanding not only about the nature of God, but of ourselves. There are fears being expressed here that need to be brought out, seen for what they are. They too may have their own bubbles of illusion. This poem is expression a pathway towards forming a much richer, more mature relationship with God. In this sense, Raptor is a call to be free to wrestle with dark emotions, frightening thoughts and observation of evil. We can never know God fully. But if we open ourselves emotionally and imaginatively, we can grow into discovering a relationship with God which can, despite all, hold our terrors, inspire our wonder and help us see, as He does, into the dark. Sources R. S. Thomas. No truce with the furies. Bloodaxe Books, 1995

A reading of the poem by Carol O'Connor On Wednesday the 16th of June, Carol O’Connor led a Spiritual Reading Group session via Zoom on the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. Four poems were discussed, the fourth poem being ‘The Bright Field’. This image is a pencil colour drawing by Philip Harvey. The Bright Field 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 realize 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. As far as I am aware we have no copies of any sermon which R.S.Thomas delivered. We know, from parishioners, that his sermons spoke to congregation members where they were at and met their needs. He himself maintained that the job of a priest was to represent the church in its teaching. However, in 1972 a film was made of R.S.Thomas by John Ormond. In it, R.S. Thomas created some controversy by statements such as - ‘Poetry is religion and religion is poetry…Christ was a poet….The New Testament is metaphor. Resurrection is metaphor….When one is discussing Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects…..The resurrection is a metaphorical use of language as in the Incarnation. My work as a poet has to deal with presentation of imaginative truth. Christianity ems to me is also the presentation of imaginative truth. So there is no necessary conflict between these two things at all. And as a priest I am committed to the ministry of Word and the ministry of the sacrament. Sacrament is language. The combination is perfectly simple.’ (See Morgan & Williams) The New Testament is metaphor. Resurrection is metaphor. When asked to comment on these words Rowan Williams, ever helpful, offers a pathway through for us: when we hear such statements people can tend to slip the word ‘just’ in there - the New Testament is just a metaphor. However, such a statement from R.S.Thomas is tougher than this. He is not saying that these are simply ways of talking about religion. But here he is making a serious claim. Poetry and metaphor are ways of knowing. And the word truth in the phrase ‘imaginative truth’ is not redundant. So the expression of religion for R.S.Thomas means the necessary employment of the imagination. Spirituality can never be captured or pinned down (to use a recurring metaphor this morning) in language. It is not literal but more than this: mystery, living, ever unfolding. Perhaps these words of R.S.Thomas are close to Jesus’ own use of parables, in which to teach and help open the spiritual mind of those he met. Perhaps too, metaphor became a way for R.S.Thomas to open his own mind into understanding the nature of our relationship with God. The Bright Field came out in the volume ‘Laboratories of the Spirit’ during RS Thomas’ last year at Aberdaron. The poem begins by referencing two parables from St Matthew’s Gospel chapter 13: 44-46: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.” “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.” R.S.Thomas brings immediacy and particularity to the parables. Also, again his sense of time in this poem shifts. ’The kingdom of heaven’ has been found when the world lit up in a field. It was only for a moment and half-overlooked in that moment, even forgotten after. But at some point later it is remembered and with that the realisation that this is in fact, ‘the pearl of great price.’ The emotions of the poet swivel now from past indifference to a strong need to ‘give everything I have to possess it.’ What was overlooked is realised subsequently to be extraordinary and the poet would give his life for it. The illumination has been seen. It can be again. This is the kingdom of God. The poem plays in the reader’s mind on the paradox of linear time, chronos, the nature of its transitoriness, and kairos, eternal time. Memory can call you back to remember, even your youth, but it can never re-recreate what was. The kingdom is not about pining after a past that has now gone. Nor, is it fixating our mind on with future dreams and desires: Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. Looking forward or backwards is not seeing nor living in the kingdom of God. The voice in this poem again moves from a subjective experience, through a learning gained, then becoming opened out as object lesson to all: ’I have seen the sun…’ finally becomes ‘…the eternity that awaits you.’ There is something humanly instinctive in the nature of seeking this pearl, ‘the field that had treasure in it.’ Once glimpsed, it has the capacity to awaken in any person, whether they notice it or not, the seed of desire to seek eternity. But, another paradox, in order to possess it, something inside the human self must be let go of. In fact, everything must be given: ‘I must give all that I have to possess it.’ Possession of the pearl involves complete dispossession of self. For the poet, the realisation has come that life is found by truly making a home in the present. It’s found by making room for, providing space in the currents of time to open our eye to the light of what’s before us. To ‘turn aside’ like Moses, in this time present, and see the miracle of the burning bush vision that so filled the Old Testament character, Moses. The pearl is analogous to light. The sun illuminates the bright field as the blaze of the lit bush illuminated the mind of Moses. We can at first think this poem is about finding the pearl yet the real pearl, like light itself, can be felt and experienced but never fully owned. It is transitory, but also calls us on as we turn to gaze back. Here is the very Celtic understanding that God’s kingdom is not that area above and unreachable, but intensely close alongside us. It is the understanding that the eternal is already genetically encoded into the present time we are living in. As human beings we have an extraordinarily unique capacity to consciously reflect back over even experiences overlooked, or project our thinking into an imagined future. This poem has had me reflect on the last 12 months which due to Covid opened up a very difficult terrain to navigate for so many of us in the whole world. It has been a time for many, of longing to go back to what we had before and recognising the entry into a new normal. Those privileged with wifi and computer access could go via youtube and zoom, in one day say prayers with others in countries all over the world. I have found that the very best of those prayer times weren’t the ones where we longed for things to return and be fixed up, nor hankered to be in another country as if that would take us away from our own problems, but those which called us back to our present circumstances and place, and look alongside our own locked down selves and surroundings, to find the bush of Moses burning right beside us, no matter where. The Bright Field is a poem about a way of seeing the world. And it means the loveliness and joy cannot be held and caught, nor pinned down or preserved in a book. How we choose to act in the world after we have seen, is another story. But the first step is to see it. Mark Oakley understands this well when he says: ‘What we long for eludes us. If we ever think we possess God we will stop desiring Him…We know information can be got at the press of a key, but we know too truth is hard won, flinty and sharply digested in a lifetime’s search. God is always revising our understanding of God as well as who we are: his gift to us is being, our gift to him is becoming …. [R.S.Thomas] knew the inadequacies of words but uses them as it were, like setting a trap for clarity and for his God. He levels the ground of faith with honesty.’ (Oakley 9) Sources Barry Morgan & Rowan Williams. Laboratories of the Spirit : R.S. Thomas’ religious poetry. Public conversation conducted by the Learned Society of Wales Cymdeithas Ddysgedig Cymru. On Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtgpHmEASj0 Mark Oakley. R.S. Thomas and the hiddenness of God. University of Gloucestershire, Park Campus, 2017 R. S. Thomas. Collected poems 1945-1990. Phoenix Giants, 1993

The choice to remain in a particular place, the waters where you have been born, turbulent now where once a reassuring murmur - lacking courage to leave? Or having only grim tenacity to stay put? But where else to go? Does the heart become a stone? It is in familiar fixtures that we are delineated. The edges of self, the definition of our body like a sharp rock with lines and flecks of character; knowledge and belief hold their own interpretation of the sunlight dancing carelessly on the water’s surface. Such chips of self, pebbles heaped in small mounds together, rubbing shoulders in tumbling streams - to know such place amongst other people is to begin to see with another eye, be pulled inside a current, and we over-trust our cloudy vision. We are disturbed. The clear knowledge comes that we were already unseeing when we first entered this fresh, clear stream. We have rolled ourselves out too far midstream and broken our neighbour’s heart. We long to bathe once more in the waters of unknowing. We are denying. And so we thirst again and again for clearer, cleaner streams. When love fails, when the stepping stones over the river never reach the other side, we are cut open and bleed. Only then the lonely burden of our stone heart is rubbed smooth, slowly under the river’s own cleansing, gentler hands. Carol O’Connor

In the spirit of adventure, early 2020 at the beginning of our first lockdown due to COVID-19 in Melbourne, I decided to attend an overseas online Anglican Church. I chose St James, Piccadilly in London, because their Rector, Lucy Winkett, has stirred my imagination over the years with her podcasts when Canon Precentor at St Paul’s Cathedral, London. In 2010, her Lent book, Our Sound is Our Wound was a soulful, enriching read. I promoted it that year in the Bookroom. Lucy is a deeply perceptive priest, attuned to the challenges of not only local concerns, but our world humanity. Her language is carefully modulated, poetic and hard hitting. I knew she’d have some worthwhile things to say during a world pandemic. I’ve never in fact physically been to St James’ Piccadilly nor St Paul’s London. But early 2020, I was ready for new life it might have to offer. Lucy doesn’t preach at every Sunday at St James Piccadilly, and I soon was to hear a number of very different clergy and their variety of perspectives. Intelligent and engaging they all are. Over the last 14 months, my own Christian perceptions have been challenged and inspired by their words. I was very moved this week during our online Camino Companions Zoom at St James, when Parish Council member, Adolfo, spoke of me now as a member of the St James Community. Whether online or in person, community is born out of what we share amongst each other. We can be part of several close communities. We can give out to one another material objects, food, our very physical presence can be a form of giving. But sharing can also take the form of words and stories and listening: all gifts distributed in any healthy community. And for those in Christian community and other religions, we not only share our stories and thoughts and feelings, but also pray for one another. These days, after saying Evening Prayer or Compline, with my St James friends at 6am here Melbourne time (when I wake up in time for it!) I go through my daytime pondering them fast asleep or wakeful and restless during their night. We are a community in all time zones across the world - London, Melbourne, but also Paris, the United States, Spain……. In one of my very early Zoom greet sessions after online worship at St James, parishioner Eleanor Butler recognised me from the previous week’s Zoom. She said: ‘one day I hope I’ll be able to give you a big hug.’ That day may or may not ever happen. I may never even get to visit St James. And that’s not really the point. The friends I’ve been making there are warm and hospitable as if they were sitting comfortably in my very lounge room - which often they are but in the form of small brightly coloured digital boxes. Eleanor’s husband, Dick Butler, is a retired English Anglican clergyman. She’s a retired doctor. They have a house in Dorset, where they’ve spent their lockdowns. But also an apartment in the Barbican, London. For many of their retirement years they’ve lived between the two places: enjoying London theatre and art galleries, attending St James Piccadilly and spending Summer golfing and long walks in the South West of England. Eleanor and I now email one another a few times a week -sharing our thoughts and concerns, our joys and new milestones in or out of lockdown. When Dick was active in clergy life he wrote a book: The Four Gospels and Other Texts: A Critical Handbook of the New Testament. He first wrote the material as a set of fact sheets for his congregation, a hand book, ‘their aim was not to persuade but to inform.’ This book is designed to inspire us to critically examine our own New Testament assumptions, help us grow and mature in our biblical understanding. By exploring the different themes between Gospels, noting the sources and examining the culture they were born in, the handbook serves to bring our thinking back to basics. There are also one or two radical ideas which we are invited to make up our own minds about. A tangible gift from a community made online. When I opened the box of The Four Gospels and Other Texts books gifted by Eleanor via mail to the Bookroom, it was as if she herself stepped out: “Hello, here I am. I am real.” The book is now available for sale in the Bookroom. Too often we can dismiss the world of internet YouTube and Zoom gatherings as ephemeral and second rate and fail to to take each other seriously as community. But in this last 14 months, this online community has formed so much of my heart and Christian understanding. The Gospel burns bright and true - lighting our immediate surrounds as well as our Zoom communities. Carol O'Connor

Palm Sunday has a very different feel about it this year compared to last. Then, news of the worldwide spread of Covid-19 was full on, our first hard lockdown in Melbourne in place, and people’s reactions radically various. One by one, planned events were cancelled. Our liturgies in Holy Week moved online to Youtube. Community began to emerge in new ways; Zoom Rosary had just been set up. This year there’s a feel of relief mixed with trepidation as we at St Peter’s begin our pilgrimage into Holy Week. Coronavirus figures released this week on the ‘Worldometer’ indicate that in total worldwide since the pandemic began there has been over 124 million Coronavirus cases, over 2.7 million deaths and just over 100 million recoveries. Still currently there are over 21 million active cases. What do we make of these figures? Each ‘case’ is a person with a name, life-story, connected into family and community. What are we to make of this? Just before Jesus enters Jerusalem, he asks two disciples to go, untether a colt for him. The account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem takes place in all four Gospels. It’s significant. Jesus processes into the Holy City riding a colt or donkey, as garments or leafy branches are spread under his feet. We tend to think of colts as humble, echoing words from the Book of Zechariah. But they were also considered regal. And here, as in Isaiah, I imagine Jesus’ face ‘set like flint.’ Stephen Cottrell in The Things He Did describes Jesus at this moment as ‘decisive and humble.’ Cottrell goes on, ‘Everyone seemed to think he could see into tomorrow. But all he could do was what he had to do. He knew it was of God; that God had called him to this hour. But he didn’t know where it would end except in confrontation and vindication: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your King comes to you; triumphant and…..riding on a donkey."’ Cottrell finishes this description, after the crowds gathered and dispersed: ‘(Jesus) didn’t look like a leader now. He walked towards Jerusalem as if in a dream, and the salt of his tears lay unwashed upon his face, plain for all to see.’ This is Jesus on Palm Sunday. Riding on a donkey in a world that really wants to push aside the reality of pain, death, disease, injustice. But even today Jesus challenges us to see our world honestly. Decisive and humble, he faces his own impending suffering without flinching. We too really don’t know where the Coronavirus pandemic will end. We don’t know where this time will take us. Not looking like a leader doesn’t mean that Jesus isn’t one. He is leading inside-out from that very place of our own uncertainty. He is full of the compassion of unwashed tears; leading by this very compassion. And perhaps for us today, by asking our empathy for each and every person who has suffered or died from Covid-19 since it began over 12 months ago; recognising each as named and forever held in the palm of God’s hand. Carol O’Connor

‘Stay with the music, words will come in time.’ Malcolm Guite. Carmelite nun, Jewish born philosopher Edith Stein was killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz in 1942. A young Jewish woman travelling with her, Etty Hillesum, recorded in a letter to her sister from Westerbork, (the transit camp enroute) that she had met two German nuns, ‘What an extraordinary impact they made on those who met them even just for a few moments on the train.’ It’s also reported that at Westerbork Edith Stein had been offered an escape plan by a Dutch official. She refused, saying: "If somebody intervened at this point and took away [her] chance to share in the fate of [her] brothers and sisters, that would be utter annihilation." A single person by an action or their words, can have the capacity to enable others to re-see the geographical and emotional landscape surrounding them, and in so doing can totally change their way of being in the world. Words, even those of a stranger, can turn the perception of others around as if re-designing their very environment. In the story of the Transfiguration, the disciples are taken away by Jesus to a remote place. They already know him and are prepared to lean in, listen to his teaching, follow his way. Their hearts are open to trust him. The Transfiguration, this great unveiling of God in Jesus, isn’t about the witness of power and might of a superhero. Suffused with a white light, there is no version of white supremacy here. The revelation is an affirmation of the divinity and humanity of God’s love. The long narrative of God’s Love is galvanised into this one moment. And will continue from. The hearts and minds of the disciples are blown away. It’s terrifying. Although the experience makes sense to them at one level, it also leaves them puzzled and questioning. They want to build three tents to memorialise this momentous revelation, but also know they need time to reflect on it. “Tell no-one,” says Jesus. Meaning, think about it. Not only that, but most especially, live it. As Bp Graeme Rutherford likes to say, ‘Walk the talk.’ We can be tempted to think of Transfiguration as a one-off, dramatic and life changing event. Over the top. But surely one of the messages in this story about Jesus, is as Desert Father Joseph said to Abba Lot, that we are each asked not only to say our prayers, keep our fasts, meditate, but also ‘be transformed into fire.’ More often than not, in reality those ‘transformed into fire’ are not the ones making the sweeping changes in the world. They are the persons going about their ordinary lives in the most simplest of ways. Not perfect, but somehow at home in their skin and seemingly at one with circumstances around them. They are easy to be around. They possess a profound capacity to listen. What we most remember later, and it usually is later, is the way that they helped us re-see our environment. This is not so much because of what they did, but because of something they allowed to shine through them. They may not have even seen it themselves so aligned have they come to be in practising God’s action through them. Our world seems a whole lot better. They shine peace. ‘Become an open singing bowl,’ the contemporary English poet Malcolm Guite tells us. If we stay open, the heart of God is given space to move inside us. Just as the great transfiguring heart of Jesus was in Edith Stein when she moved amongst the Jewish people in the train on their way to Auschwitz in 1942. Just as the whole experience of pain, hardship, injustice, suffering, power imbalance was reconfigured for those three disciples of Jesus at the Transfiguration. A new courage, a new hope, a new way of understanding what the love of God means, can be born anew. In waking up to such reality, Malcolm Guite encourages, 'Stay with the music, words will come in time.’ see: The Singing Bowl by Malcolm Guite, Canterbury Press, 2013 painting by : Philip Harvey, during Lockdown, Melbourne, 2020

For God so loved the world - that She invented the first ray time of creation. When the lowering gaze of the sun’s rays and its rising moon over a new land becomes a blessing for the world as one. A time when gum trees scorched by fire take a long drink from melting snows, the echidna roles herself into a ball waiting for sleep as the robin clears her throat in preparation for this day’s melody. For God so loved the world - that He gave us time in rhythm and season, a light we could take responsibility for; a darkness still haunting, but deepening our souls and yearning for healing. Gave us portals of safe harbour to view from; networks and routers, and interconnected media devices so the length of day could be measured by listening, prayer time, sharing the act of living into light time. For God so loved the world - that they gave us this richness of learning. For its not the coming together of continents through invisible waves of global communication speaking, but wisdom, found in a stable at Christmas, a love for everyone, near and far, in day and at night: endless compassion for the poor, the refugee, the lonely, endless inclusion for the LGBT+, the depressed, the bipolar. In the first ray time of creation, all find a place at the table. Carol O’Connor

Estragon: Let’s go. Vladimir: We can’t. Estragon: Why not? Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot. Estragon: Ah! (Vladimir walks up and down). Can you not stay still? Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett i In the mid-1980s the San Quentin Drama Workshop performed a series of plays by Beckett in Melbourne. This acting troupe had been founded by Rick Cluchey, an inmate for armed robbery at the San Quentin prison north of San Francisco, in the 1960s. Becoming fascinated with the plays of Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd, Cluchey eventually came to work closely with Beckett, who himself directed the performances. The Workshop included a number of actors who were ex-inmates. In the play Waiting For Godot two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly under a tree for Godot to arrive. We are never exactly told who Godot is, but he is a figure of some import who we are given to understand will bring meaning and enlightenment to the very point of their existence. During the play they are visited by a boy who tells them that Godot cannot come today, but will do so tomorrow. There’s also Pozzo, who resembles a circus ringmaster; he brandishes a whip and is tied by a length of rope to Lucky, his slave. Godot never arrives. It may seem odd to be reflecting on a play, subtitled Tragicomedy in Two Parts, in the context of Advent. But the act of ‘waiting’ is a theme often attributed to this season of the Church year. This tragicomedy abounds in references to Christianity and the Gospels; at one point Estragon says that all his life he has compared himself to Christ. The stage setting is stark, stripped back bare, purporting to reveal an understanding of waiting that is free of illusions; so free as to expose human existence for what it really is. During their brief season here in Melbourne, I babysat two children of a couple of the actors from the San Quentin Drama Workshop. The boy was around 8 years of age, and the girl about 4. A few times, when I turned up to their rented house, the mother was alone with the children. The little girl had dark rings around her eyes and was very withdrawn. The mother explained to me that the couple had fought and the children had witnessed violence. She herself was tired and frustrated by the marriage. Their lives were driven by the father’s obsession with his work. Family and domestic life always came second. When their differences came up he could only speak by means of force. He was out of prison now, theatre had given his life a new meaning and he had freedom in the world. But he was still imprisoned by the dynamics of violence and power. One night I watched this couple perform Nagg and Nell, in Endgame. Their life, as parents of two young children asleep back in the house, was completely lost to them as they expressed the meaning of human existence from the vantage point of two elderly people forced to squat in separate dustbins. Perhaps they themselves also felt like refuse in the world. Perhaps they were drowning, not waiting. When the illusions of life, the amassing of material possessions and money, the ambition for promotion or power or fame, the quest to be immortal or denial of death (the illusions are endless as they can be subtle) are stripped away, is life simply backboned by absurdity and tragedy? Given some of the world events this year, I am inclined to believe so. And given my own random moments, dreaming to be headhunted for management of the biggest and best religious bookshop ever, also adds evidence. And yet once more, this year as a Christian I will faithfully wait through Advent for the arrival of the Christ Child late December. Once more Christmas will come: the usual Christmas Eve service, the presents, the family dinners. Despite the commercialism, the rituals are in and of themselves good, but there is routine, habitual and fraught at the edges, anxiety-making expenditure, endless social events, ‘difficult’ relatives … Stressed and ‘over it’, Boxing Day will be a relief from the drowning of Christmas. So, are Vladimir and Estragon expressing something I secretly still hold to be a truism of existence, despite all this? Is the journey of Christian hope a security blanket over the inevitable admission that Christmas is essentially a cover up? A faking of hope because the human species really is alienated and alone? In his latest work, The Tragic Imagination, Rowan Williams examines the nature of tragedy in theatre through the lens of George Steiner. In a short paragraph referring directly to the work of Samuel Beckett in terms of expressing tragedy in a Godless world, he says: The expression of a vision of absolute tragedy cannot any longer be tragedy as literary form; contemplating a humanity essentially and eternally alienated from the universe it inhabits now imposes an absurdist idiom since our world does not even know that it is Godless and has no vocabulary for expressing its Godlessness. When we have forgotten what it is that we no longer believe, we cannot summon up even the negative image, the ‘metaphoric’ recovery of the tragic. Tragedy dies and absurdism ‘black farce’ is all that is left to us, so our need is not for more books about tragedy but for a new theory of comedy.… Rowan Williams immediately moves from this into a discussion of ‘theatre of the extreme’ - tragic drama in Britain that represents a ‘deliberately drained moral world’ and employs extreme onstage violence, including rape and dismemberment. It’s as though absurdist vision, if not held in check by that ‘black farce’, could untangle itself lethally into tragic representations of indiscriminate and barbaric violence. Pozzo’s whip could become unleashed on Vladimir and Estragon. The grim, black humour, the irony and poetic dialogue in Waiting For Godot keeps the moral vision in check. But maybe Vladimir and Estragon are not missing out on anything. What if we are asked to humanly know this experience of waiting in alienation with a touch of the farce? Asked to wait in endless, circular, hope-dashing dislocation, without even knowing what it is we are dislocated from, or even knowing that we are dislocated. Vladimir and Estragon are making the best they can of it under this tree because there’s simply nowhere else to go. But rather than contemplate this tree as a Bodhi tree of enlightenment, they construe it as one to hang oneself from; after all, Vladimir and Estragon suppose, hanging would at least give then an erection. Tragicomedy. Vladimir and Estragon are caught in some kind of inescapable loop, which I both recognise as true and ask questions of. There’s no life, no sense of Spring here. Like dreams that go nowhere, pots of money that are meaningless, holidays that are routine, words - including words about Advent - that are simply patter, this play, like all Beckett’s drama, presents life as one endless endurance test. If characters aren’t getting buried in sand as in Happy Days, then they’re speaking monologues into tapes, Krapp’s Last Tape. They drown in darkness and they don’t even recognise it as darkness. ii ‘The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who have dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.’ Isaiah 9:2. In a piece of writing relating to Advent, Jürgen Moltmann speaks personally about ‘a people in darkness’: This phrase touched me directly when in 1945 we were driven in endless and desolate columns into the prisoner-of-war camps, the sticks of the guards at our sides, with hungry stomachs and empty hearts and curses on our lips. But many of us then, and I was one, glimpsed the light that radiates from the divine child. This light did not allow me to perish. This hope kept us alive. Moltmann’s words aren’t a call to wait for such extreme experiences to find hope, but a recognition that he has already glimpsed something bigger than all this, before the rounding up. This glimpse is not to do with the denial of violent reality or the quest for justice, but that real meaning lies in the experience of God’s Love. As he was herded to the POW camp he knew this, even though the vision was taken away. To take away the favourable circumstances, or even the language, doesn’t take away God. This is the light that is seen in the darkness of the cross. This is the gap into which we all descend. Essentially it can’t be articulated, only experienced. Such is the essence of love. God suffers alongside in our woundedness and is humanly grounded in ‘the light that radiates from a divine child.’ If you see life through a lens so closely identifiable with God, a God who has given Godself to us as Incarnate Love in Jesus or, as Moltmann puts it ‘whose birth opens up for us the future of a life in peace that is different from all life hitherto, since that life was bound up with death,’ then something else begins to happen. You become ‘enfaithed,’ to borrow a word from the poet Denise Levertov. To glimpse the ‘light that radiates from the divine child’ is to realise within the self, the promise that the violence, darkness and meaningless of the world is met and overcome. Divine Love, simply by its ground, does this. The love of God frees all prisoners. ‘Can you not stay still?’ asks Estragon of Vladimir. He can’t, because to ‘stay still’ is to be in a present space of prayer. It is to learn what it means to wait ‘at the still point of the turning world.’ We see ourselves naked and empty handed. We stand before one another and recognise that we are sustained by something deeper. It’s in times of stillness that we learn how to become a hope bearer, rather than a bystander waiting to go. As an audience of a play we are asked to ‘stay still.’ And in watching a performance of Waiting for Godot we experience not so much a waiting for something to happen, but a waiting upon the present moment with Vladimir and Estragon. The non-arrival of Godot becomes irrelevant. Live drama, by its very nature, is presence filled. In witnessing Vladimir and Estragon’s experience of waiting we recognise a shared fellow solitariness. Daily habits of thought and actions that seem to foreclose life in on us, paradoxically now open us up. We know this place, and we re-see it. Godot won’t arrive, but God is there already on stage; unvoiced, unnamed, unrecognised. But deeply present and alive in the banter, the dared friendship, the black humour, the starkness, the not seeing. And God is also in there in the connection with us, the audience. Vladimir and Estragon may misrecognise the violent dynamic between Pozzo and Lucky and try to act it out, but they are unable to. Theirs is not a reality grounded on violence edged with madness. The audience, far from being depressed by the end of Waiting for Godot (unless it’s not a very good production) leaves the performance elated. This is not just because of the eloquent dialogue or humour or grim truth as to the nature of our Godless existence that doesn’t even know it is without God. But it is an instinctive inner recognition that we ourselves are vulnerable, fragile human beings who exist in relationship. When life is shaped by attending upon the present moment we learn to swim. There are many different styles of swimming, and we begin to see that the strokes themselves are something more than actions only with a shoreline in view. The title of this blog is a play on Stevie Smith’s poem: Not Waving, but Drowning. I was much too far out all my life And not waving, but drowning. How do we see life rightly? How can we know life as people who are waving, not drowning? Do we wait for Godot or wait upon Love actualised and in our midst? Moltmann knew the Divine Light ‘that radiates from the Divine Child’ as he was led to a Prison Camp in 1945 because he had already dared himself to be still and know God. He had already spent time waiting in darkness. Seeing through eyes that were so poor, he was able to recognise the light in the darkness. By this steady gaze he saw the dynamics of violence and dictates of habit that imprison us. He was able to hold faith that the Promise of God still held true right there too, in the daily tasks and endurance of that prison camp. Christmas will come again. There will be the usual routines special to the Advent and Christmas season. Whether or not it is a tragicomedy will be up to how open my own eyes are in my relationships with others. Maybe Advent can give me a little more heightened sensitivity to the practice of waiting with a sense of hesitation. Waiting upon is that moment’s hesitation which consciously holds us back so something else, very present, can manifest. ‘The people in darkness have seen a great light’: this is the radiant presence of God’s love. The Divine Child in the stable manger is the one who can teach us how to wait boldly, courageously, upon such love.

The mineral rose up in me; a wave of nausea and my eyes stung. I tried to hold the seeing steady, but what I saw kept dissolving and I surrendered to the cost. Others saw only a white pillar, but my salty eyes blurred back to the city, all sulphur and furnace. But seeing too, nations and more nations of stars swelling, and the well, the tamarisk tree, footsteps of the sojourner who would offer his bound son, and there were sisters too who were wives, and birth rights stolen as blessings, and more wells, and children on camels, and pillars of stone covenants, and gates from heaven opening ladders of angels. And I remembered yesterday, seeing through the window strange faces of the two angels at our gate; I thought they hated us, and Lot’s words to our neighbours caused blood to drain from my girls’ bright faces: mute horror at his offering. He was not a pillar of the community but he trusted sorely; I bled. We fled today and my mind began to move in vague shadows, my feet lost direction, a dream came, my household Gods scattered; I looked because I heard music back at the well calling me, saw my own veil left there. Now nothing blossomed. I mothered nothing. My city’s shame uncovered, and I a fleck within a fleck of time. Only when the others moved onwards, not looking back, did my head begin to clear. Dissolving clarifies the mind, but I burned deep for a love my city forfeited. My home was not my home. I saw then a woman offering water from a well to a man. And another man, obscurely in another time, another woman and my veil uncovering her face, her salty skin, her alien eyes my eyes. He gives her the water that I am thirsty for – dissolving memory, dissolving time, dissolving too, that ancient well.

Many of us here at St Peter's, Eastern Hill, have had the privilege of hearing Bp Graeme Rutherford preach, or have been taught by him in the Trinity Course or at Trinity Theological College and will, I'm sure, continue to have echoing in our ears for years to come his well-worn words: It's not enough to just talk the talk, you must walk the talk. Slipping the Moorings is an autobiography that would completely endorse Bp Graeme's dictum. Born in 1940 in Takapuna, a quiet town on Auckland's North Shore, Bp Richard studied Arts at the University of Otago and from there Theology at St John's College in Auckland, and was ordained Anglican priest in 1965. This was a time when 'church participation...moved from a habitual routine for many to a chosen activity for the committed.' It was a time of dwindling numbers in churches and a period of 'deep theological questioning' for Bp Richard. It was a painful time that finally led himself and his wife, Jackie, to sail to New York to learn more about theology in the context of contemporary life. From here, in the late 1960s, he began to find his true vocation. He had begun to encounter new ways of being church, that reached out and spoke to people on the street, the poor and marginalised. Along Bp Richard's path are many people who have inspired him and helped resource his social conscience. Among these, in the early years was Daniel Berrigan, Roman Catholic priest, who became known here in Australia for his protest against the Vietnam War and later in 1980, when he trespassed onto the General Electrics nuclear missile facility in Pennsylvania. Issues such as racism, peace, poverty, and other ethical questions were all at the forefront of theological thinking at the Union Seminary in New York and helped expand Bp Richard 's conscious commitment to work in these areas. The theology he was learning contrasted radically with what he had experienced until then in New Zealand. It informed his whole understanding of Anglican Church and mission: 'God was seen as active throughout the world, the spirit of love and reconciliation, suffering with the poor, the spur to right conduct in individuals, institutions and nations. Arising out of worship and teaching, the Church's task is to be active in the workplace, society and politics, to work for universal justice and well-being. The primary direction is church to world, not world to church.' It was with new insight and understanding that Bp Richard and Jackie, with their growing family, moved to England in the early 1970s. Here he took on a curacy in the parish of Egglescliffe, near Newcastle, which involved two days a week with Teesdale Industrial Mission. Bp Richard 's description of life at Teesside 'where smoke-stacks, concrete and steel were everywhere in evidence ' and his visits to shipyards and coalmines made me think of Fr Lawrie Styles, who spent his last years here at St Peter's and died in 2011. Although their paths seem to cross only briefly, Fr Lawrie spent many years in Industrial Mission in England. Upon graduating from Cambridge University in the 1950s, Fr Lawrie joined the Industrial Mission in Tyldesley, a town between Manchester and Liverpool. He too became interested in the 'tragic gap that existed between clergy and industry...' and tells us in his book My God, What Now? that in order to connect with those he was serving he found it important to visit the local pit and see for himself what it was like at the coal face. 'I asked at the time of my first visit to the pit whether I should wear my clerical collar so that those I met would know who I was. "No need", came the reply, 't'message will go down ahead of thee before thee enters cage.' The only people that seemed to be astonished were my brother clergy in the neighbouring parishes when they found me walking home from a pithead in their parish — black with coal dust.' After a number of years' experience in Industrial Mission and with his sense of vocation now clarified, Bp Richard went back to New Zealand in the mid-1970s. Slipping the moorings is a memoir of a life founded on a belief that for any priest sermons and ministry must relate to contemporary times, or they become irrelevant. As Vicar of St Peter 's Church in Wellington and part of the ecumenical Inner City Mission, Bp Richard was never afraid to speak out on controversial issues. For example, at his initiative in 1989 a statement was issued, backed by 94 New Zealand clergy and laity, decrying a Government proposal to purchase four new naval frigates. A major debate opened up in the media following this statement — not least the belief that the church should keep out of politics. But this is precisely where the church, Bp Richard believes, needs to be. For it 's here that many issues 'determine for good or ill, the extent of poverty, or the well-being of families. ' So it has continued to be that he has put his energies into issues such as social justice, poverty, Treaty of Waitangi partnership, nuclear free New Zealand, anti-apartheid, gender equality, same-sex relationships, and public ethics and made public statements about them. He often attracts controversy, but always gets people to take issues seriously that otherwise could be swept under the carpet. Bp Richard holds the view that: '...a silent church is a church that has become preoccupied with its own life and has lost sight of its mission to be a channel of compassion and a voice for justice. Both church and society are poorer for that. In speaking and acting I have always sought to be well informed on matters of faith as well as on topical issues. I also seek to consult with others before forming a viewpoint. Having done that I have taken a stand and prepared myself for whatever responses might come.' On one level this memoir is a critique on Christian leadership in the 21st century. True Christian leadership doesn 't just happen, but evolves over time and experience. By means of stories and reflections, critical engagement with the world 's and his own ideas, Bp Richard shows us what such leadership can look like. Projects that involve social justice issues take time and patience, as well as hands-on commitment. Christian leaders need not only a moral compass and instinctive bias to the poor and marginalised, but courage and ability to take risks - to speak out publicly when needed. Though subtle in his thinking, Bp Richard is often much more interested in getting to the point and acting from this place, rather than 'navel gazing.' He is a straight shooter, but 'prepared to win some, lose some '. A good Christian leader he tells us, like any leader, needs effective communication skills and an ability to work in a team. He or she needs to be grappling with contemporary issues and listening to people all the time. Most importantly Christian leaders need imagination and times of deep reflection and prayer, because at the heart of all this type of leadership is Christ and the Gospels. In many ways this is the real strength of the book. The title is a 'plea that the church should slip its moorings ' from a place of comfortable complacency and become part of the challenge to work for a more just, environmentally and ethically aware world. And it 's a plea that is directed as much to bishops and clergy as to laity. When he came to live in Canberra in 1994, as assistant bishop with responsibility for the church in the wider community, Bp Richard saw this as an opportunity to further this chosen role of hands-on Christian ministry. He gave addresses at conferences and chaired inquiries on the issue of poverty, became chair of the then named Canberra Church of England Girls ' Grammar School and affirmed the place of trade unions in the Patrick Stevedore waterfront dispute in 1998. In 1995 he was shocked to discover that the only Aboriginal Bishop, Arthur Malcolm, had no effective speaking or voting rights at General Synod. In all these areas and more he worked for justice and right relations. After returning to Auckland in 2000, he has worked on the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification and later on the Advisory Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology. Once more, as in Canberra, he was called upon publicly to defend his views on homosexuality. And, as in the subsequent debate concerning his views on faith where he was then 'caricatured ' as being an agnostic and unbeliever, he felt the need to stress that his views are personal, like those of others: 'As a bishop of the church I accept the policies and decisions of the Church and live by themâ. What one can expect is that a bishop will respect the convictions of every person, and ensure that all are included. I lament the immaturity in the church, or any institution if the leadership is prevented from speaking openly lest it cause offence. Clergy and church members need to be mature enough to live with diversity rather than to operate from a mindset that 'it 's my way, or the high way'. To read Slipping the Moorings is to hear the call to all of us here at St Peter's to continue to recognise the richness of diversity of individuals within our own parish life. Bp Richard 's work reminds us that church community needs authentic responses from its parishioners, and needs a leadership that seeks to focus on the poor and marginalised. His mandate that the primary direction is church to world, not world to church, made me also realise the abundance of gifts we have to offer in this way. We have our obvious ministries to the public every day: the Institute for Spiritual Studies, the Breakfast Program for the Homeless and the Bookroom are such places. But there are many other important areas where this interface happens. Against a current tide of church practice we keep the doors of St Peter 's Church open everyday for people to come in and sit and pray. Our Vicar and Assistant Priests ' ongoing links with Parliament, Brotherhood of St Lawrence, Anglicare, Fire Brigade and Ambulance keep us connected with broader city services. Our collection of food parcels for the refugees, the pastoral care team who regularly visit elderly and sick parishioners, as well as inner city hospitals, the Children 's Play Group, and the recent practices of Ashes to Go and Palms to Go — where clergy and parishioners stand at Parliament Station bringing these to the world — all these are signs of our engagement in the contemporary world on many levels. There is always more work to do. But by remembering that we are not a church that should stay closely moored to its own preoccupations and existence, navel gazing, but called every day to 'venture out into the deep ' we ourselves as a community can help bring the reality of God 's love into the wider world.

‘To be holy is to be natural; to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.’ Anam Cara. An edited version of this essay appears in The Melbourne Anglican December 2017. John O'Donohue is interested in the work of the soul. If the human soul is to be known at all it must understand itself in relationship. Ultimately it rests in mystery. This, however, this is not O’Donohue’s starting point. His premise is existential. Words like aloneness, nothingness, emptiness are used frequently in his works. His is a vocabulary of anxiety and isolation that touches on so many of our modern day preoccupations. But into that lexis he pours ancient wisdom, the language of early Celtic Christians, and the astute insight of contemporary thinkers. Beginning with the philosophical notion that the human self can experience itself existing as a separate identity in an otherwise random universe, he delights in taking the reader on a bridge over an abyss, to show us the contours of a different landscape. We now see the world, as William Blake said, with an eye that ‘alters all.’ John O’Donohue’s work doesn’t just come out of nowhere. In the preface he tells us that he has embarked on an inner conversation with the Celtic imagination, but it’s more than this. His works are set upon a foundation of reflections by many theologians, poets, philosophers, and mystics. His quotes are variously sourced and seem endless. Just by having lengthy Suggested Further Reading lists at the end of his works he emphasizes the importance of building on the ideas of others. We all exist in relationship. We each have our own voice and sensibility. O’Donohue’s voice is lyrical and poetic. He synthesises the ideas of many contemporary and historical poets into his own distinctive voice. Its utterance attempts to evoke in language his own living relationship with the Divine. This personal and unique relationship with God is what he wants to help foster in us. O’Donohue is primarily writing from an experiential way of living in the world. He wants the reader to move out of our heads and into the heart, to take all our ideas and concepts deeper into the heart’s region and move in our lives from this space. When I discovered John O’Donohue in the 1990s I was helped to articulate more clearly how a self that senses itself to be dislocated in the world and trapped in fragmentation, can be shaped into wholeness. He used, for me, a very familiar vocabulary - the language of the outsider, the misfit. The language of someone who longs to belong, but knows that any belonging on a human level - to a social set or country or religious group - is fraught. I’ve never felt that I truly belong anywhere, nor do I think that’s an uncommon experience. I’ve come to realise it as gift, because if this longing can’t be met on a human level, it must sought in the Divine. Then there’s the discovery that faith asks us to risk the belief that our longing to belong in God is met by God’s longing for us to belong in Him (or Her). This becomes a risk worth taking. For John O’Donohue, when the ‘I’ dies spiritually into this universe of relationship, the self becomes not only more authentic, bigger, but also realises its own very deep connection in the whole of creation. The self finds her soul and finds that the soul’s home belongs in God. John O’Donohue was born in County Clare, Ireland, 1956. His brother writes in the forward to Four Elements, ‘We were born into a farming family and our first lessons were learnt through the medium of nature.’ The valley in which John was born and raised formed the casting of his soul. He referred to it as ‘my private sky.’ The eldest of four children, his early education was local, then he boarded at St Mary’s College in Galway. At 18 he entered the novitiate at Maynooth, completing degrees in Arts, English, Philosophy, and Theology. After being ordained for priesthood he became a curate in a Connemara parish. In 1986 he worked on a PhD on the dialectic between the individual and society in Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, entitled ‘The Person as Mediator’ at the University of Tubingen in Germany. During these years he was much more directly exposed to broader European influences on his own thinking and praying. I don’t believe that this thesis has been published in English, which is a great pity. In the 1990s he was a priest in County Clare. He developed a strong interest in the works of the 14th century mystic, Meister Eckhart. Echoes of Memory and The Four Elements: Reflections on Nature were published during this time. He lectured in Humanities before his breakthrough came, in terms of public recognition as a writer on spirituality, with the publication of Anam Cara (1997). Later, after applying for a year’s leave from the university, which was refused, he resigned and began to lecture and teach around Europe and America. He became a full time writer. Eternal Echoes followed, then Conamara Blues, his second book of poetry, in 2000. At the end of that year he ‘retired from priestly life’ and bought a cottage in Connemara which became his sanctuary and writing refuge. The process of writing Divine Beauty (2003) absorbed his thoughts and feelings so intensely that afterwards he would enjoy recounting his mother’s words: ‘Ah, poor John, Beauty has killed him’. Benedictus: Book of Blessings was published a few months before his sudden death in 2008. John O’Donohue wrote through the period in Ireland known as the Celtic Tiger, a time of great cultural renewal and economic prosperity. For the first time in decades, more people were coming into Ireland to work and live, than were leaving. With this startling economic growth came a new optimism, confidence, and re-assessment and appreciation of Ireland’s own cultural identity. The nation’s own church structures were opened up for accountability and renewal. Coincidentally many spiritual writers in England, Scotland and Wales, were beginning to re-discover the Celtic roots of their Christian faith at this time, amongst them Esther DeWaal, Ian Bradley, and Mary Low. Philip Newell was writing about Iona. In 1994 a new edition of The Carmina Gadelica was published. David Adam was translating and writing his own range of Celtic prayers which are now also set into the Church Calendar. Celtic Daily Prayer: A Northumbrian Office was published in 1994. It’s into this mix that John O’Donohue wove his own fresh, unique voice. No matter what life affirming vision his family upbringing brought him, I think many of the teachers and priests that John O’Donohue grew up with would have been very different from the sort of teacher, priest and writer he became. My own Dublin Catholic parents in the 1960s very much reflected the Catholic sensibility of a 19th and early 20th century Ireland. God was patriarchal and compassion was earned by supplication and propitiation. The face of God was like that of the British Imperialist: a parochial and petty dictator. He threatened the power to bend your back and make you starve. ‘I’ll put the fear of God into you’ was a familiar phrase from my elders. However, O’Donohue’s more instinctive, intuitive faith showed him a very different face of God. He recognised more and more that we find God in the present moment, in the self, in place and memory. In blessing and beauty. This understanding and experience of faith as relationship, grounded primarily on Love, was expressed by a much earlier group of Christians: the early Irish Celtic Christians. Theirs was a faith that had a lot to teach him. John O’Donohue makes it clear that our ‘modern connection with Celtic tradition must be critical and reflective.’ He distances himself from New Age Celtic paraphernalia of commercialism or supernatural rituals. His concern is with the hidden life of the soul; with having the courage to acquire self-knowledge through opening yourself into relationship with divine love. God is Love who seeks real intimacy, vulnerability, openness. God asks us to risk all, to trust in a reality that we cannot see, but is working with us for our psychological, spiritual and physical wholeness. Quoting St Bonaventure: ‘Enter yourself, therefore, and observe that your soul loves itself most fervently.’ Importantly, this is a love that does not end in itself. Once this relationship with the Divine has been entered, unlike the relationship of Echo and Narcissus, it ‘should then liberate us from the traps of falsity and obsession, and enable us to enter the circle of friendship at the heart of creation.’ Eternal Echoes (1998) was published at the height of the Celtic Tiger, a work I believe in which O’Donohue is warning the Irish not to get trapped into the falsity of self-love only, not to be imprisoned by substituting spiritual fulfilment for economic prosperity. He reminds the Irish, and all his readers and students, that our souls hunger for something much more than economics; it longs to become connected with a wider circle of love through whose generosity of giving we are all encircled. I have always resonated with John O’Donohue’s call in his writing to stay open, with his capacity to know God via imagination. He urges us to break open our inner landscape - unpack what we know. He pares back to the bone: memories, thoughts, even language itself is scrutinised. He loves the root meaning of a word: eg, desire comes from desiderare, meaning to cease to see. He delights in digging up arcane words: Entwind, meaning God un-becomes. Like Irish poet Seamus Heaney, he loves ‘digging.’ And by breaking open in this way we begin to see the world anew. With psychological astuteness he shows that by clearing out our own inner field, we allow primordial longings to rise up so our vision can be enlarged. Our capacity for wonder is increased. But so too in this process, those people we are most intimate and familiar with suddenly seem strangers. A stranger may bring danger, but also can bring blessing. Our human task becomes to break open the familiar so we can once more see it afresh. This then, is the heart of prayer, to ‘liberate the Divine’ which means to ‘liberate the self.’ If you lose the capacity to do this, you ‘remain unaware of your freedom to change how you think. When your thinking is locked in false certainty or negativity, it puts so many interesting and vital areas of life out of your reach. You live impoverished and hungry in the midst of your own abundance.’ Ultimately O’Donohue’s purpose in breaking open is not to analyse or accrue knowledge, but to remove the ‘wall you have put between the light and yourself.’ It is for renewal, replenishment, refreshment, not clever know-how or destruction. Openness also means a preparedness to let go of predictive or linear thinking. Many people who have visited Ireland comment later, with a mixture of amusement and frustration, about their experience in asking for directions. To ask an Irish person for directions is to risk being sent on a journey charted with many strange coils and turnings. O’Donohue’s own prose style is a little like this. He is much more comfortable with the circular forms of thought patterns. Each of his prose works has its own broad theme. Around this main idea, smaller themes cluster like the intricate loops of a Celtic knot. However, always is the same vision: God is Good, God is Love. As Trinity, God encircles our life individually, our life communally, creation itself. This looping prose style movement exemplifies how we experience the movement of a deeper self in the world. This is because ‘…the imagination has a particular rhythm of vision which never sees directly in a linear way. The eye of the imagination follows the rhythm of the circle. If your vision is confined to linear purpose, you may miss out on the secret destiny that a form of activity can bring you.’ It isn’t via the logical or rational that one’s deeper longings are fulfilled. He goes on to say ‘…the linear mind, despite its sincerity and commitment, can totally miss the gift. The imagination in its loyalty to possibility often takes the curved path rather than the linear way. Such risk and openness inherits the harvest of creativity, beauty and spirit.’ Though a philosopher, John O’Donohue’s prose won’t bear the scrutiny of reason. He is not interested in reason, but contemplation. It’s only via our imagination that the reader can be moved into a contemplative space. Sometimes his prose reads like a series of non-sequiturs, like a series of epithets, beautiful statements or series of quotes, but lacking an obvious unifying thread of reason. But what it works to do is gently push your mind to think in another way, to enter another space. So you read a few lines, and then look away from the page and reflect. This is the invisible space of prayer. The journey is down, not along. In Anam Cara he writes: ‘When time is reduced to linear progress it is emptied of presence…. If there were a spiritual journey it would only be a ¼ inch long, though many miles deep. It would be a swerve into rhythm with your deeper nature and presence…..You do not have to go away outside yourself to come into real conversation with your soul and with the mysteries of the spiritual world. The eternal is at home - within you.’ To move into the contemplative space is to journey toward ‘the hidden world that waits on the edge of things’. It recognises possibility, delights in taking you to the spaces in between - ‘the imagination works on the threshold that runs between light and dark, visible and invisible, quest and question, possibility and fact.’ So not only is it a movement down, paradoxically it also takes us to the edge. It is into this liminal space, the world of the invisible, the ‘ab esse’ (to be elsewhere), that we are each called to go. For here, ‘absence seems to hold the intimacy of some fractured presence’. Like the early Celtic Christians, he recognised that this realm of the invisible is ‘a huge region of our life.’ Anam Cara is the only book I know whereby the author in the prologue confesses to a ‘silent hidden 7th chapter which embraces the ancient namelessness at the heart of the human self.’ After the 6th chapter which is on Death, there is no chapter 7 because it is silent and hidden within ourselves. We come from a place that is silent and hidden, and thus, ‘our longing for the invisible is never stilled’. Likewise, we cannot see our own or others beliefs or thoughts, but they are great determinants of our tangible being in the world. ‘The invisible remains the great background which invests your every gesture and action with possibility and pathos.’ The importance of absence, of the invisible, is an ongoing theme in all O’Donohue’s works. It is this space that we inhabit when we enter church, ‘The house of God is a frontier region, an intense threshold where the visible world meets the ultimate but subtle structures of the invisible. We enter this silence and stillness in order to decipher the creative depths of the divine imagination that dreams our lives.’ The church is the place of prayer, ‘even though the body may kneel or words may be said or changed, the heart of prayer activity is invisible. Prayer is an invisible world.’ These explorations help O’Donohue realise that to know real beauty in the world is to know what he calls who-ness. Who-ness is that unnameable part of self, also that unnameable relationship we have with God. O’Donohue says: ‘The who question is the most numinous and mysterious of questions … Who has no map. When we claim that God is beauty, we are claiming for beauty all the adventure, mystery, infinity and autonomy of divine who-ness’. But who-ness, though dwelling in mystery and unnameable, still has to manifest itself. O’Donohue encourages us to trust our body, our physical senses. It is via the body that we experience our sense of place and belonging in the world. He writes, ‘the human body is the house of belonging; it is where we live while we are here.’ A large section of Anam Cara is devoted to a discussion of each of the five senses. The importance of the physical body, the nature of matter in our geographical landscape and our vital link with the world’s ecology, is never lost sight of. Because of who-ness we see more clearly what is right before our very eyes. Just before he died, John O’Donohue completed his work Benedictus. (2007) It’s a book of blessings. Blessing, he says, is invocation, ‘a calling forth’. The word ‘may’ occurs often throughout the work because it is a word of benediction, ‘the spring through which the Holy Spirit is invoked to surge into presence and effect…’. By blessing we call forth change, transformation, a new fresh atmosphere, even in the deepest suffering. He writes ‘Whenever you give a blessing, a blessing returns to enfold you.’ When John O’Donohue came to Melbourne in 2001 he blessed many of us by his words and stories and wisdom. There was no bookseller at the event I attended but he was quite happy to sign copies of his work that people had brought along. I’d brought a ton of his books for sale in the Bookroom. When my turn came, lugging a mountain of Anam Cara and Eternal Echoes, he saw right through my ruse, my embarrassment. And he laughed as he signed away, saying, ‘Gosh, you must really love my books.’ I felt blessed.

We grow best …not by direct and anxious conflict with our difficulties and bad qualities, but by turning to and gazing at the love, joy, peace of the saints, accepting their standards, setting our wills and desires that way. Concerning the Inner Life (Underhill, p 51) First of two addresses on Evelyn Underhill & St Benedict Church of the Resurrection at Mt Macedon, All Souls Day, 2019 In the preface to his recent book, Luminaries - Twenty lives that illuminate the Christian way, Rowan Williams writes about how one person's story can change another person's life. He goes on to offer the stories of luminary figures who have influenced his own thinking and being. These are the ‘stories and writings that themselves set out to decipher the world and the attempt to illuminate it.’ These figures, and their stories, may also help us make sense of God. This may be a startling process. Jesus himself used narrative to unveil truth. In telling stories, throughout the New Testament, it’s as if Jesus is saying: ‘At the end of this story you will not be where you were at the beginning.’ The parables in particular, ‘push us towards getting away from the cliches which we imprison ourselves, towards taking us into another world, or several other worlds, where we don’t yet know the end of our story and where the categories and conventions we’ve been taking for granted don’t automatically apply.’ (Luminaries px) The stories of saints lives are each unique but they all point us back again and again to the one story told in different ways and from different perspectives in the New Testament: Jesus. And this draws us, as do the writings of Evelyn Underhill, St Benedict and many other figures of light as well, to the foot of the cross. And from here, even further onward toward a nameless silence. For us, to decipher the stories of the saints’ lives as they in turn deciphered and attempted to illumine their world, is to be broken free and know the world afresh from new perspectives, to acknowledge that we don’t yet know the end of our own story. At first these two saints, Evelyn Underhill and St Benedict, both recognised in our Anglican Church Calendar, would seem to be the stories of two very unlikely persons to sit side by side. They exist far apart in time and space. One, born at the end of the Victorian Era in 1875, the other died in the Early Middle Ages 547CE. One, a woman, grew up in London, an upper middle class privileged life, educated, married and enjoyed frequent trips to the continent. The other, a man, born 1300 years earlier, in Rome, also of good family and education, but as a young man chose to live a hermit life in the foothills and then in a cave above Subiaco. Eventually, through an unintentional gathering of followers, he was persuaded to become an abbot then later found a monastery at Cassino, a town halfway between Naples and Rome. ‘The Saints have nothing to hide; they can be viewed from any angle.’ WH Auden in his poem In Praise of Limestone, tells us that saints reveal the infinite ways people can connect with God. In our own deciphering the lives of the saints, we witness the relaxed freedom to be oneself. This means not trying to be something we are not; nor ‘strain after something which is inaccessible.’ (Concerning the Inner Life, p 71). St Benedict and Evelyn Underhill radiate a light about what it means to live with a sense of ‘having nothing to hide.’ There is a sense that what is in shadow can, with patience and in time, slowly grow out into the light. They both lived in their own historical times of great uncertainty and change; both knew the harrowing effects of violence, the terror that people and nations could inflict. But their own deciphering about God was not haphazard, their illuminations not coincidental - the same God sang to and in each of them. In turn they were both formative in changing the lives of those around them. They each came to realise that by means of a deep solitary prayer life, we are as human beings, are created not alone and existential, but in relationship - our primary relationship being in and with God. And this God, who sang to them, is the very same God who sings to and in us, within our own hearts and our communities, and in the world today. This is the God we name, Love. There are four points of intersection between these two saints which I am here offering in these two addresses. I’m sure there’s more, but here’s four broad strokes attempting to show something of their narrative which sought to make sense of the world and in turn, helps us in making sense of God. 1. Our relationship in and with God always starts from the place of the heart. Evelyn Underhill is most well known today for her two major works: Mysticism (1911) and Worship (1939), both which still remain in print today. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend either of these works as the place to begin to read her or understand her life. They are books to be studied, rather than sat with in meditation. It helps to decode the word mysticism, itself. This word can sit uneasily for some Christians today. But for Underhill its meaning was very plain and had nothing in it to cause alarm. For her the mystic is the person who experiences the God’s love and this experience then informs their spiritual way of life. Drawing on other religious writers of her contemporary age - William James, Rudolph Otto, Charles Williams - she variously assigned to God, terms such as the Eternal, or the Infinite, or Changeless One, or the Absolute, or the Real, or Love. These words would have been in current use during her day. A person’s experience of God enables them to see Truth more clearly and they able to move with suffering in such a way that their lives and the lives of others become more creative, even flourish. The mystic’s life centres on adoring God, and from this well of God’s love, comes a capacity to share the love of God throughout the world with others, under varying circumstances. And here is our first insight. Underhill maintained that mysticism is a ‘science'; but unlike our own understanding of science today in the 21st century, it not only gives the domain of ‘feeling’ a legitimate place in this field, but finds it essential. Mysticism is a science of the heart. To be in relationship with God is to start from the place of the heart. She writes: ‘In the sphere of religion it is now acknowledged that the “God known of the heart” gives a better account of the character of our spiritual experience than “God guessed at by the brain”…. that the loving intuition is more …… trustworthy than the dialect proof…’ For her, ‘The heart, eager and restless, goes out into the unknown, and brings home, literally and actually, “fresh food for thought.” Hence those who “feel to think” are likely to possess a richer, more real, if less orderly, experience than those who “think to feel.” ( Mysticism, p 48-49). The heart then, is that touching stone or that ground within us as another much earlier mystic, Meister Eckhart called it. This inner ground is a place to be trusted; an inner place to go back to and to be honoured for its wisdom and teaching. The heart is the place we connect into during our times of prayer, meditation, in stillness and silence. We may need tools - mantras, images, Gospel stories - to gently lead us here. The heart space is a place of paradox and mystery. For some it has no ground, as another great uncanonised saint, Thomas Merton has said, here in prayer: 'A door opens in the centre of our being and we fall through immense depths, which although they are infinite are still accessible to us… All eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact.’ (New Seeds of Contemplation, p 227). This is the heart space. 2. Our hearts and minds need to remain open: our perception expansive and inclusive. Evelyn Underhill was born in 1875 and died in 1941. Her life moved through a number of different periods history: the Victorian and Edwardian eras, First World War right up to the beginning of the Second World War. To live through this rich period of changing moods in history gives us a clue, I think, to our second insight: the importance of remaining open, of cultivating a heart that is expansive and inclusive. In her younger years Underhill was educated privately at home and then became a boarder at school. In 1893, she attended the then recently opened Ladies wing at Kings College London. She studied botany, languages, art and history. She read philosophy (via which she later in a letter to a friend claimed was how she came to God) and poetry. She thought of her herself then as a Neoplatonist. Throughout her life, Evelyn Underhill kept her heart and mind open to fresh ideas and new possibilities. She took her cue here from the lives of the saints. She writes: Their personal influence still radiates, centuries after they have left the earth, reminding us of the infinite variety of ways in which the Spirit of God acts on people through people, and reminding us too of our own awful personal responsibility in this matter. The saints are the great experimental Christians, who because of their unreserved self-dedication, have made the great discoveries about God; and, as we read their lives and works, they will impart to us just so much of these discoveries as we are able to bear. Indeed, as we grow more and more, the saints tell us more and more: disclosing at each fresh reading secrets that we did not suspect. Their books are the work of specialist, from whom we can humbly learn more of God and our our own souls. (Concerning the Inner Life, p 55-56) Born English middle upper class and nominally Church of England, she came to consider herself an agnostic and at the turn of the 20th century she became very influenced by a movement called modernism. The influence of this movement continued for the rest of her life. In 1907, Underhill had a conversion experience and decided to become a Roman Catholic because of its sacramental emphasis. Her writing, even at this stage in her early novels, always centred on this pursuit of truth; she researched and wrestled with ideas about how to bring modern science, psychology, philosophical thinking into Christianity. However, one of the two main reasons she never converted was because of a Papal Encyclical which condemned Modernist teaching. It wasn’t until after the First World War that she chose to become Anglican; she needed a sense of community around her. In particular she was drawn to Anglo-Catholicism and in the 1920s, her work, became much more focussed on personal prayer and vocation. During this period she led retreats and gave many addresses to different denominational Christian groups: Methodists, Baptists and Quakers. Underhill emphasised that the mystic path is open to all; but ‘achieved by the few whose lives were open to transformation by that which they loved.’ (Evelyn Underhill by Dana Greene p 51). It was her own guidance by a vision of the Holy Spirit that is expansive and inclusive, I think, which enabled her at the beginning of the Second World War to enjoin her small prayer group to pray especially for the change of heart of Hitler and Mussolini. All people are made in the image of God. The call for non-violence and peace was and is a call for all of us. 3. Place ourselves at the doorway between the invisible and the visible; attached detachment. Although Underhill emphasised the spiritual journey of the heart in God, she was always a very grounded and practical woman. After writing Mysticism, a shorter work, Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People, quickly followed in 1914. She emphasised that mystics not become overly introspective. All spiritual inclinations are most energised and transformative when realised in human living. During the First World War Evelyn Underhill undertook social work and naval intelligence; she prepared and translated guide books. From a young age she was a competent yachtswoman. She always knew that she was socially privileged, and accepted her own place in respectable English society. She was a dutiful daughter and later respectable wife who acquiesced to its attendant social responsibilities. She never questioned gendering God as ‘He’, and writing ‘man’ meaning ‘person,’ or ‘he’ meaning both ‘he and she.’ There were certain givens in her life which she simply accepted. Later, in the early 1920s, to her spiritual director, Baron Von Hugel, she confessed to inwardly ‘falling to pieces’ during the war years. During this period however, as she began to deepen in her own prayer life with the wise and gentle witness of another, she began to discover a more finely balanced place between her inner life and her outer action. It was a period of finding congruity between being active, engaged in the world and in personal relationships, and yet open to hearing God, who to all intents and purposes appeared invisible in the world. Von Hugel encouraged Underhill to practice what he called ‘attachment with detachment.’ And it was in part due to this practice, I think, that she began to hold herself with more maturity in that very difficult space, the doorway position between the visible and invisible. The practice of ‘attachment with detachment,’ as I sense its meaning, is a recognition that you can feel close and intimate with another, but also develop a sufficiency of space between oneself and the other. It’s an encouragement to inhabit the gap between presence with, yet also holding back from. There’s a turning towards the visible, be it a person or thing, yet also keeping something aslant in one’s vision towards the Infinite. By this practice a love is slowly cultivated that sets free the other; gives space for the another person to be who they are. It acknowledges another persons relationship in God, as well as honouring our own. 4. All of this is premised on a life of prayer. Develop patterns or habits of the heart. From the 1920s prayer and vocation become the main subject of Underhill’s teaching and writing for the rest of her life. Worship and prayer, Underhill believed was essential, and something the church at that time was in danger of losing. Abp Michael Ramsey later said it was Evelyn Underhill who kept the church going during the period between the wars. In her book, Concerning the Inner Life, Evelyn Underhill, based on her addresses to Anglican Clergy on retreat at Pleshey in 1926, she makes four useful points about prayer life. Firstly, our souls need a regular practice of prayer life. Like all relationships, we need to find time and places of rest, of retreat, meditation if we are to grow. In these quiet spaces we both receive and transmit grace and gratitude. We ponder the mystery of God. We give ourselves permission to ask hard questions. Here too, we can contemplate God’s transcendence - awe at the night sky filled with stars - as well as immanence - the memory of the love of God revealed in the smile of a stranger - in creation. This need for space and rest, solitude is essential food for right orientation in God. This is downtime to deal with ourselves, and tend to God. Secondly, different temperaments will pray differently. Some people will be more attracted to the changeless and spaceless Presence of God; some will need words or phrases; some familiar prayers, some by leaning into the Gospel stories. ‘We grow by feeding and not by forcing; and should be content in the main to nourish ourselves on the food that we can digest and quietly leave the other kinds for those that they appeal.’ However, we should not totally disregard the ‘totality of the whole.’ She writes, if we are ‘strongly drawn to the concept of the Eternal and Infinite Spirit’ and pray only this way, we risk becoming too ‘thin, abstract and inhuman’ loosing that the sacramental integration with the senses; or if we are more drawn to Christ centred devotion, we can lose ‘depth and awe because the object of its worship has lost sight of the horizon of Eternity.’ Thirdly, our prayer life needs the nourishment of spiritual reading: ‘Proper feeding of our own spiritual life must include rightful use of spiritual reading.’ This of course, means scripture. But, interestingly, for Underhill, spiritual reading is ‘second only to prayer as a developer and support of the inner life.’ Cultivate or be cultivated in your relationship with God first, then read. Without the orientation of right relationship, even Scripture is in danger of being misread. She encourages reading about the canonised and uncanonised saints. For here is ‘not only information but communion…with the great souls of the past…’ And then we, she says, ‘… discover these people to be in origin…..very much like ourselves. They are people who are devoted to the same service, handicapped by the very same difficulties…’ Fourthly, and finally, she writes about distraction and dryness: ‘our ‘mental machinery …is often rebellious and hard to adjust. It is on much more intimate terms with our sensory and motor reactions than it is with our spiritual desires and beliefs. It has a tendency, produced by long habit, to respond easily to every stimulus from the outside world.’ (Concerning the Inner Life, pp 45-65) There are within us all sorts of distractions causing us to lack attention or find no interest in what we pray about. There are also constant involuntary thoughts and images. For Underhill we can educate these distractions by identifying and witnessing them, then choosing a prayer to say: for example a vocal prayer, which gives no information to God, but ‘give(s) to us that temper of mind in which we can approach Him.’ Learning short prayers or mantras can be very helpful here. Our bodies too can play a part, kneeling or physical rituals can ‘put us in the mood’ to approach God. And finally, Evelyn Underhill gives us some very wise advise. Every person with a developed life of prayer she tells us experiences periods of dryness. She recommends, here move with the ‘dictates of grace and common sense.’ ‘Accept the situation quietly…don’t aggravate it..’ And here we need to practice gentleness and patience with ourselves. (Concerning the Inner Life pp 65-66) In one of her letters to a friend (Letters, 1923: 313), Evelyn Underhill wrote: ‘…avoid strain. …….go along gently, look after your body, don’t saturate yourself the whole time with mystical books. …..Hot milk and a throughly foolish novel are better things for you to go to bed on just now than St Teresa.’ References Luminaries: Twenty lives that illuminate the Christian way By Rowan Williams SPCK, 2019 Concerning the Inner Life By Evelyn Underhill Oneworld Publications, 1995 This is a good introduction to contemplating what the spiritual life means for Evelyn Underhill. Evelyn Underhill: Artist of the Infinite Life By Dana Greene , Crossroad Publishing Company, 1990 This is a very good biographical starting point in understanding the life of Evelyn Underhill. New Seeds of Contemplation By Thomas Merton New Directions Press, 1962 The Letters of Evelyn Underhill Ed and introduced by Charles Williams Longmans, Green & Co, 1944