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

Dear Maker of all time, as this year ends help me remember each day is in You. I am sorry for those I have hurt, and those times I’ve lacked the courage to say ‘no’ to actions witnessed, that hurt others. In the year to come help me see beauty in the ordinary, and know borders only as places in my garden where mutuality and kindness abide. Whenever I encounter abuse hold steady the spirit of truth within me; give me voice. May suffering find healing. Help me not pine for what I do not possess, but honour the abundance I already have and in turn give generously to others. Help me let go the need of approval from others and know the hard edges of self, the humbleness of earth, that upside down is right way up when living the mystery of being fashioned by You in Your time, and in Your hands.

The Canticle of the Creatures Lord above, source of all goodness: praise, glory and honour and blessing. You alone are God, unnameable to all your created people. Praise You, my beloved Maker, especially Brother Sun, bringer of day whose light is radiant and beautiful, so like You, beloved of us all. Praise You, in Sister Moon, and her stars formed in clarity, precious jewels of night. Praise You, for Brother Wind, for his air, serenity, for clouds, for his climate which sustains us. Praise You, in Sister Water, unlimited purposes, she is humble and precious and pure. Praise You, in Brother Fire, illuminating night, beautiful, jocular, robust and strong. Praise You, for our Mother and our Sister Earth, who nourishes us, governs us, offers flowers and herbs. Praise You, for those who carry sickness and suffering graced in your love. Blessed are those who advocate peace, You exult and crown them. Praise You, dear Lord, in Sister Death, for mortality, she accompanies each one of us. Grief in those who die not knowing You. Blessed are those who die in You for the second death will do them no harm; to be only in You is life itself. Trans. Carol O’Connor

Philip said to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works….” (John 14:8-11) The disciple Philip’s words to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied,” are so human and relatable. My own words could easily be: “God, just show me Yourself and I will then know how to act in my life with some certainty.” There are thinkers and writers, like Anne Lamott, who write: ‘The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.’ Anne Lamott goes on: ‘Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.” (Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith) Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. It is as simple, as possible, and as difficult and impossible as that. Mess. Emptiness. Discomfort. When I notice mess, instinctively I want to tidy it up. Mess can happen when things are left scattered everywhere. It also can mean I feel a lack of control on my part - I can’t control this mess. As we grow up our minds develop patterns of order so we can make sense of the world. We learn the rules. Mess threatens a systematised life. However, when encouraged to hold steady our gaze over this mess, without panic, without giving in immediately to the urge to neaten things up, we can begin to acknowledge that mess plays a very real part in what it means to be human. Noticing and letting it be is everything. Mess can be the ordinary everyday general untidiness of life or it can happen through human loss, violation or wreckage by another. Taking time to look steadily at this mess, is to loosen a little control that the disorder has over us. Show us even, eventually, that we may be also be heading a little more towards a place of creative emergence. Noticing, letting be, in the emptiness. Like mess, emptiness has a sense that time itself is somehow fixed in stasis. There’s a feeling that the self is disconnected from the world around us, and that life is frozen and not moving. We are not going anywhere. The world is seen to be an eternally bleak, lonely futureless existence. Again using Lamott’s word ‘notice,’ and once more not flee in panic or denial or fill up with more palatable gratifications, can mean we begin to experience this emptiness differently. That capacity to hold our gaze, gives us the strength to stay in the emptiness. Emptiness, as our Eastern Buddhist friends know, is also a space of enormous freedom of thought. Here there are no dualisms, no fundamentals or certainties. Only the detection of many different choices; here creativity can be energised, and there is the invitation of new unexpected paths. Emptiness is also a space of spirit breathing. Faith, for Lamott, also includes noticing the discomfort. Anything that causes us pain or discomfort we are often automatically conditioned to think of as wrong. What if there is a dis-comfort that is neither right nor wrong, just is. Dis is a Latin prefix meaning 'apart from' or not connected into. The disciple Philip seems to feel this type of discomfort when he reveals to Jesus that he has not seen God in the way the way he would like to. He still doesn't feel linked into a greater reality. Jesus’ response to Philip is as of a friend and teacher. Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Jesus doesn’t objectify nor dismiss Philip, but speaks to him out of a relationship they already share. And this is where I draw on Ann Lamott’s words: Faith also means reaching deeply within, for that sense which one was born with. It’s deep within his relationship with Jesus, that God has been born and dwells for Philip. And it’s to this place that Jesus is appealing and directing Philip to go. Technology is full of wonders, science gives us great gifts, church practices can hold us steady in our actions. But it’s drawing on that felt sense of being in a loving relationship deep within ourselves, or that taste of the light, that help’s us nourish faith. Helps us, even when we think we’ve lost faith itself and abide in a place of great uncertainty. Faith is not about believing in an objective truth, but about hanging in there in a relationship. By keeping our gaze steady over the mess, the emptiness and the discomfort, we are staying faithful to the relationship. And in this relationship something is always given: even if it’s just the inspiration to simply take a long walk.

During the Cold War period of the 1950s a unique person was elected Secretary General of the United Nations: Dag Hammarskjöld. A well educated Swedish economist with an aristocratic background, he was elected Secretary General in 1953 not only because he was experienced in Foreign Affairs but also because he was considered a good middle of the road candidate who, coming from neutral Sweden, would so to speak, toe the line. However everyone, including ultimately Dag Hammarskjöld himself, got much more than they bargained for. For here was someone who was prepared to work for world peace at whatever the cost, including to himself. In what’s sometimes been termed the Farewell Discourses in the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks extraordinary words to 11 of his Apostles on the night before his crucifixion. Jesus knows his death is immanent and the Apostles are about to enter into a completely unknown landscape. He will no longer be physically present with them. He urges them to keep his commandment of love: ‘those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.’ (John 14:21). He promises them God will send another Advocate. This word in Greek is Παράκλητον, Paraklēton: literally an Advocate or Intercessor, or a Comforter, or Helper. The paraklēton will enable the Apostles to abide in the Spirit of truth. Reading a biography about Dag Hammarskjöld and the words in his personal journal published posthumously, we learn of a person who very much risked living in this spirit of truth that Jesus speaks of. Hammarskjöld’s work for the United Nations was not about making decisions behind a desk in New York. He chose to personally negotiate peace deals between world leaders. In 1957 he took the extraordinary step of travelling to China, speaking face to face with Premier (doe-enlye) Zhou Enlai. He sought, and eventually effected the release of US hostages from that nation. On another occasion, he chose to personally meet and speak with each of the leaders from both Israel and Egypt. And so resolved critical differences during the Suez Canal crisis. Such a commitment to and personal involvement in working for world peace however, came at a great cost. In 1960, as Hammarskjöld was being flown over the Congo to mediate in yet another dialogue. This time it was between two Congolese leaders with regards to imperial control over this land. The plane was shot down. Dag Hammarskjöld was alive on impact, but died soon after. Who exactly shot down the plane is still not fully explained today. Give me a pure heart - that I may see Thee, A humble heart - that I may hear Thee, A heart of love - that I may serve Thee, A heart of faith - that I may abide in Thee. This prayer is from a private diary of Dag Hammarskjöld's. After he’d died the diary was found with a letter describing it as ‘a sort of White Book - concerning my negotiations with myself - and with God.’ It’s called Markings and is a work of variously dated personal meditations and reflections over many years. It shows how one person sought to understand what it means to be alive in this world. What it takes and means to live in the spirit of truth and be a peace maker. During his lifetime Hammarskjöld used to hike the mountains in the north of Sweden. When a climber passages up an unchartered mountain they make trail marks, a series of stone piles or cairns to mark their progress. These piles of rocks aid climbers on their descent so they should know their way back. The word for these way markers in Swedish is ’Vagmarken,’ translated as markings in English Reflecting on this prayer: Give me a pure heart - that I may see Thee, A humble heart - that I may hear Thee, A heart of love - that I may serve Thee, A heart of faith - that I may abide in Thee and the meaning of the word Vagmarken or Markings, has prompted me this week to ask the question: What are the trail marks, the tokens of meaning in my life at this time of COVID-19 that can help me navigate my journey in this terrain? What are those signposts that can direct us home towards God? This new landscape is still very unfamiliar. Where is the comforter, the spirit of truth found? What is written in our White Books - our series of negotiations with God? In other words, what are our markings? The beauty and value of the Gospels is that they reveal a new truth to each generation, and the different challenges encountered by people throughout history. Theologians, spiritual writers, even Christian diplomats like Dag Hammarskjöld help us unpack this story of Jesus in new ways. Like our Christian prayer tradition over centuries they offer ‘trail marks’ we too can turn to and find advocacy, comfort, and counsel from the spirit. Just as Jesus sent the Paraklēton to those first 11 Apostles, he has sent this same comforter and intercessor to each of us to help us abide in the spirit of truth at this time.

A Series of Vignettes during COVID-19 I I am in a bubble. And you? Socially distanced? No. My beloved. My heart aches. II Greed breeds mountains of desire; the curve of love is steady, generous, attends only the needs of today’s pocket. III Last week, crowds alive, such noise! Now space dissolves the heart, takeaway air serves an uneasy menu. IV A stranger’s list found in my shopping trolley! Each letter elegant, bold and poised, a fact. I hope no item was forgotten; Love’s hand holding. V Our world shakes, uncertain, fleeting. The Spirit, timeless, steady, calm, moving us into new inwardness; a new now. VI So much crashing down. Emptiness. What is real? This light, this space, this Spirit of Life who leads us on. VII Streetscape changed, unfamiliar signs. These roads hasten new directions, but am I travelling in circles? VIII One day the world skidded stop-still and the little shop stuck fast that point; it’s merchandise a receding backdrop.

Fr Hugh put together a Lenten Series this year: Friends and Companions - Books that have Shaped our Theology and asked four ordained and two lay leaders at St Peter's to preach each Sunday then lead a discussion group. This sermon I preached at High Mass on the First Sunday, 18th February. Genesis: 9:8-15 1Peter: 3:18-22 Mark 1: 12-15 When I was a teenager I was part of a drama troupe, GSODA: The Geelong Society of Operatic and Dramatic Arts. We performed musicals like Hello Dolly and The Sound of Music - full of enthusiasm, but perhaps a little short of their original heyday. We were taught many old music hall and Vaudeville songs. One, you may know it, was written in 1917 and later performed by Judy Garland include these lines in the chorus: ‘I’m always chasing rainbows, watching clouds drifting by; my schemes are just like all my dreams ending in the sky,’ finishing with: ‘Believe me, I’m always chasing rainbows, waiting for the little blue bird in vain.’ It’s a sad song about the senselessness of life, there’s a mixture of resignation and self-pity as the singer contemplates a lifetime experience of failure - the blue bird of happiness is a wild goose chase. It certainly would have been a heartfelt song during the Great Depression. Why did God shape God’s first covenant with human kind in the form of a rainbow, as we hear in the first lesson today? After all those nights of flooding rain, couped up with his family and that large menagerie of creatures what did Noah think and feel, when he first saw this rainbow? A few lines after this passage, Noah’s son Canaan shames him by speaking about seeing Noah naked having drunk too much wine; is this, a poignant reminder about our own wounded humanity? Was there ever a bluebird of happiness for Noah? When I read books by Rowan Williams or listen to his addresses, even those I find most abstruse and impossible, I always sense his encouragement to keep asking questions, to reach for that place further into. Questions keep the Gospels and the stories in the books of the Bible alive; the time to start being concerned is when you are certain that you have the answers. For Williams there is also that sanctioning to be totally free and intelligent in your prayer life, open and honest in your relationship with God and an urgent request for us all to think and speak more subtly. Self-awareness is a life cultivated in the spirit. To become truthfully attuned of one another’s frailty and to begin to recognise those chains of fantasy we enmesh ourselves in, is to start to understand how deeply our personhood is grounded in God. Rowan Williams is Orthodox; his Anglicanism is influenced the by the Russian Orthodox Church but more so by the Anglican tradition itself down the ages. We examine our history to examine our identity, he says. God is not at the mercy of historical chance or change but consistent; and relation to God in a community is not restricted by time and space, culture or language. Though careful grammar and logic are imperative in our discussions about God, Williams constantly directs our gaze away from his words, from ourselves, and towards our living relationship with God. His model of prayer is that ‘the Holy Spirit brings you to the place where Jesus stands and gives you the words to speak with the Father.’ For him, God, is not the giver of a bluebird of happiness. What is on offer is much more than this. God is the Giver of an invitation into relationship. In today’s Gospel, Mark tells us that Jesus was ‘driven’ into the desert by the Holy Spirit after he was baptised by John. Unlike the word ‘led’ used by Luke and Matthew, Mark chooses a NT Greek word that implies Jesus goes ‘under a force he cannot resist.’ Perhaps the later Gospel writers sought to make this movement more palatable by softening the word to ‘led’, but in doing so they lost that raw sense of something in Jesus busting to get him out there into the desert. He can’t resist this force. And this action happens right after his baptism by John, and a voice from Heaven affirms the vocation of both these men: ‘You are my son and with you I am well pleased…’ You’d think that Jesus would find it irresistible to get straight on with his mission in Galilee rather than go tearing off into the desert. Jesus certainly had nothing to prove to God by going out there. And it’s of note that the Gospel writer John doesn’t mention this episode. Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark does not elaborate about what the temptations are. But he does make it clear that Jesus is not alone there: there are ministering angels and wild beasts. Something of heaven is breaking in, and something very primal is threatening to erupt: there’s a context of hope and fear being staged behind this strange interaction between Jesus and Satan, this sorting out. The Spirit too, having driven Jesus there, would not have deserted him. But there’s no map, there’s no self-help manual, no commentary; just live confrontation. It feels as if much hangs upon this encounter - even when it’s mentioned only briefly by Mark - but what is it that’s at stake? Silence and Honey Cakes was originally a series of talks given by Rowan Williams at the John Main Seminar in Sydney in 2001. It’s based on his bringing together issues that we are grappling with at the beginning of the 21st century, with those stories and insights from the 4th and 5th century early Church Mothers and Fathers, those ‘monastic oddballs’ Laurence Freeman calls them in the introduction, who chose to live in the deserts of Egypt. It is a book which, at heart, is about how to live with your neighbour. Williams says: ‘our life and our death is with the neighbour, the actual here and now context in which we live - including that unique neighbour who is my own embodied self and whom I must confront truthfully as I confront the rest truthfully.’ Wherever you are, whether you choose to stay or leave a community, a family, your life will be with your neighbour. Whatever the motives for those original mothers and fathers seeking the eremetical life in the desert, their stories come back again and again to this theme: how can I live with my neighbour? How can I live with own embodied self? How can I begin to see clearly each person I encounter this day? What are the illusions about myself that need to be cleared away? For Rowan Williams what Satan offers Jesus in the desert is a false version of what’s real. He says: ‘all the temptations of Jesus seem to be about resorting to magic instead of working with the fabric of the real world…..Satan wants Jesus to join him in a world where cause and effect don’t matter; a world of magic; Jesus refuses, determined to stay in the desert with its hunger and boredom, to stay in the human world with its conflict and risk.’ Jesus pledges himself there. What Satan offers him is fantasy; an image of himself that is a denial of his bond with the material world and his own body. In this encounter, Jesus makes himself totally vulnerable. And though defenceless, he is fearless. Satan wants to tear Jesus apart from Love; break him from connection with his Father, and by that his link to us. Perhaps then the desert is given to us as the only place where Jesus, as Incarnation, can encounter within himself those very forces that try to block him from being human (and paradoxically make him very human in the temptation to be superhuman). So then is it ‘relationship’ that’s in the balance? I wonder if Jesus’ time in the wilderness isn’t so much about Jesus and Satan, but about his relationship with us? By saying ‘no’ to a false version of what’s real in the material world, Jesus is in essence saying ‘yes’ to being a neighbour amongst us. For Mark, perhaps it is not necessary to elaborate the temptations - it’s enough to know they happened and they are less interesting than whom Jesus is afterwards. The subsequent miracles of Jesus amongst the community, whatever we make of them are - as both Fr Philip and Fr Hugh have pointed out these last two Sundays - never acts of magic substituting the ‘bodily cost of love.’ They are manifestations of God’s self-emptying into the world, unique to Jesus. Jesus’ baptism by John in all four Gospels is pivotal in terms of terms of establishing his relationship in the Spirit and Father; but it’s in the desert experience where ‘all doors of perception’, as William Blake puts it, ‘have been cleansed.’ It’s this very action of seemingly being driven away from people into the desert, that Jesus then can subsequently begin his ministry and be so direct, so ‘fair dinkum’ with each person he encounters. What desert am I called to sit in this Lent? What illusions about myself am I called to recognise and encounter these 40 days - well, Philip my husband will probably tell you quite a lot! It’s very rare that I manage one Lent totally wine free! But, it seems to me, Jesus didn’t leave the wilderness a little more resolute in promoting the cause for sobriety, or delighted to be trim around the waist or meaningfully well read. At the end of 40 days we in the Church go into Passiontide. However, it’s after this period in the desert that Jesus began his public ministry: to teach about the kingdom of God, to give voice to the voiceless, to heal people, to bring in from the cold the outsider. He comes out of the wilderness to say ‘no’ to corruption and abuse of power, to exploitation. He withdraws often to commune inwardly with his Abba. In his travels, with his troupe of disciples, his group of women and men, that beautiful rainbow-flag-in-the- sky covenant first heralded by Noah, only then really begins to glow with fresh colour still present for us today in the 21st century; this covenant of Jesus between God and God’s people. It’s this freshness that we appreciate anew after the Passion and Resurrection on Easter Day. So, for me, for you, on Easter Sunday 2018, how then will we each be with our neighbour - that stranger, friend, loved one, disliked one, we encounter every day without fail? And what chains of fantasy about ourselves shall we have begun to be loosened from, even just a little?

As gold comes from the northern mountains, so a terrible beauty streams from God. Job 37:22 (EP) In the context of a world that finds itself surrounded by violence, and potential for violence, how do we recognise wisdom? On the 24th of December, I was given a Christmas cake from a close friend. I have never before received such a gift. Baking Christmas cakes goes back to at least the 16th century. There are various traditions. There is the boiled cake, or Plum porridge, to be eaten at the end of Advent on Christmas Eve after fasting, in order to line the stomach for Christmas Day. In another tradition, when Epiphany was considered a major feast, dried fruit and spices were added and the cake eaten twelve days after Christmas, Twelfth Night or the Epiphany. This Twelfth cake provided refreshments after a service, blessing the home conducted on this day. In England the various traditions seem to have cohered somewhat during the 19th century with a rich fruit cake, the type my mother baked without fail every year as I grew up, being made on what came to be known as, ‘Stir Up’ Sunday, the Sunday before Advent. This Christmas Eve I felt honoured to be presented with a small square parcel wrapped in silver foil and tied with one red and one green raffia ribbon. It bespoke of things not revealed, hidden in plain, silver packaging. Solid, smelling of dried fruit and spices. Later, at Christmas Eve dinner with friends after celebrating the Christmas Pageant at St Peter’s, a different sort of Christmas Cake was brought onto the table, this time covered in the smoothest white icing, a winter snow land, with a Victorian Father Christmas, fat and red, cherried cheeks, wavy white beard, timeless framed face embedded with immortal sparkling eyes. He carried a large green sack lightly, as if his shoulders and back were made only for this. Peeping out of the sack were Christmas gifts, some wrapped in paper with coloured ribbon, some the toys themselves: a china doll with a small pale pink smile, a steam engine train, shiny green and red and black. Beside the floating Santa, on a white wall of icing in perfect cursive script, were the words: Merry Christmas. When the cake was cut the icing was an inch thick, no layer of marzipan, and inside was a dry, sawdust yellow mixture dotted with raisins and currants. I was as much drawn toward the simplicity and plainness of my friend’s Christmas cake which, when opened the next day I discovered was covered in almonds and contained rich depths of dark fruit, as I felt repelled by the other outwardly glossy, beguiling Victorian perfection: a Christmas Cake in the sky. The story of the birth of Jesus is told in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The magi appear only in Matthew. The Greek word ‘magoi’ is our root for ‘magic.’ But, the magi most likely would have been practitioners of alchemy and astrology, perhaps originally followers of Zoroastrianism from Persia but not monarchs. These holy men or scholars have come to be known as ‘wise men’. And here, in Matthew’s Gospel, the birth of Jesus and the visit by the magi are told in the context of a violent world. In their journey following the star to the birth place, Herod asks the magi to tell him when they have found the baby so he too can worship. But having been forewarned in a dream about Herod’s intention to kill the child, they don’t. The slaughter of every child two years and under, in and around Bethlehem, then happens. The birth of Jesus happens in a politically violent world. It is clear from the Gospel story that without the discernment of others, ‘wisdom in the inward parts’ Job 38:36, Jesus would have been slaughtered. The gifts the magi brought to Jesus were not home baked or shop purchased Christmas cakes, of course. The three gifts at the St Peter’s Christmas pageant are the same ones brought out year after year. At once held and played with so lightly in the hands of our under-8 year olds, and then cradled so preciously during the play; gaudy, paint chipped imitations of those precious originals listed in Matthew. Gold, frankincense and myrrh: symbolic tokens of kingship, recognition of priestly status, and oil primarily used for embalming, pre-figuring death. Luckily there were not only three men, otherwise one gift would have to be left out. Or perhaps one would have carried two gifts, which would not have the same pleasing aesthetic symmetry. But were there actually three wise men, or five or seven? We don’t really know. Maybe some of them were women. As in all sacred texts we can ask questions, but mostly must sit in a place of expectant waiting. Sacred writing represents life; it is not life itself. Jesus was the incarnate Word of God, but the Gospels are symbolic representations of his life. There are questions we could ask about the meaning of the stable where Jesus was born. In Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Gospels (EP), there is no mention in Matthew of a ‘stable’, the translation being ‘house’ or ‘hostel’. The dwelling is certainly understood to be modest. He does translate the Greek word as ‘manger,’ that place baby Jesus laid down to sleep. This is the trough the animals eat from. The setting was probably in an annexe beside the house, or the downstairs area. The dwelling was clean, morally upright, but low on the social scale. Being laid in a manger prefigures the Last Supper. Already, the Word of God is shown as food for life. In TS Eliot’s poem 'Journey of the Magi', the poet-magi found ‘the place…. (you might say) satisfactory.’ On a school report generally A means Excellent. B means Very Good. C is Good. D is Satisfactory. D is one grade up from E which is Fail. So, were the magi led to a place that rates D? In a modern travel guide this place probably wouldn’t even make an entry. But as generations of Christians have been taught (alongside varying degrees of psychological manipulation with regards to comparisons to our own status) this is the very point of the story: our King was born in a dwelling that was ‘satisfactory.’ The magi were called to worship this child, born in this substandard place. Not called to a large marbled residence in Templestowe or a mansion in Toorak, but a granny flat adjunct to an un-renovated 1940s house in Sunshine. A safe and clean, quiet shelter. Satisfactory. And gloriously streaming God’s beauty. How came the magi to trust the sign of the star so much that they were prepared to follow it anywhere? What if it had led them to a child of Herod’s? We see the story backwards in time - how might they have felt living it? They were described as wise before they arrived, but what sense did it make for them? Did they pass places in Bethlehem they would much have preferred to honour their new born King in? They could foresee that he may have a tragic ending, but couldn’t he at the very least have a glorious place of birth? Wasn’t it a bit humiliating? They were canny enough not to tell Herod. But did they feel betrayed in their ideals when they arrived at this unexpected dwelling? What was there to be so wise about any of this? Despite the outward gestures of reverence surely this unexpected destination would have cast a pall over their hearts. The magi must have understood at the outset that they were undertaking a risk. In Eliot’s poem, we are told that despite the ‘cold coming’ the poet-magi would ‘do it again.’ They were a part of a story that from its very beginning turned everything upside down. Their old way of life and understanding of it was changing. Later, says Eliot, the magi was no longer at ‘ease…in the old dispensation.’ Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar journeyed not in order to worship someone who would support empires or a hetero-normative middle class stability. Their gifts were not just material, but the believed-in essence of some new beginning. They were prepared to hang their credibility on this and divest themselves of their power. What capacity, or alternatively lack of worldly wisdom on earth possessed them? Job litters his devastated life with unending questions. The brutal violence that has visited impels him to seek wisdom. All his possessions and family gone, fellow counsellors can’t reach that black pit of desolation inside himself. Finally, in attempting to look point blank at this suffering he asks: So where does Wisdom come from? And where does Insight live? Job 28:20 (EP) or, Where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? Job 28:20 (NRSV) The magi would not have looked at the nativity with rose tinted glasses. They were instinctively drawn to pay homage to the opened up glory of vulnerable Love. They didn’t tell Herod because they recognised that where there is such vulnerability, there too is the seductive desire to destroy it in the name of having more power. Scholarship and knowledge of the stars may have led them to the birthplace of Jesus, but an inner faith asked them to trust something else. This Love, with its capability of being wounded, also had the capacity to heal. As such, their faith didn’t rest on a doctrine of a church - what they saw was too alive to be contained in that ‘old dispensation.’ That had become an idol. For faith to be real it involves trusting an instinct, trusting present relationship, and most importantly trusting something happening in the invisible, perhaps the not at all right way up. The magi knew there was a One who called them. And no matter where the call took them, if they kept attention and stayed attuned, believed enough in themselves then not only would they be drawn together but shown that each possessed a gift that held meaning in this place of healing. The magi essentially knew nothing but they were wise because they trusted in the process itself, and they protected that which was vulnerable and open. What they discovered in the Child, they recognised in themselves. And they saw that they were a part of His story. In the Old, or the First Testament, God calls people and speaks out of chaos. The Lord speaks to Job ‘out of the whirlwind’ or the ‘eye of a violent storm.’ So often the nativity is set up as a neat and fixed scene. No whirlwinds please. Children, do not touch! At St Peter’s the magi figurines are moved slowly across the sanctuary during this Christmas period. There is an unacknowledged sense of journey alongside the still scene of the nativity. The ‘cold coming’ of the journey, to borrow from Eliot, is the fear each of us experiences during that difficult journey to find the place of the Christ Child. The finding too can be bitter-sweet. It subverts and threatens ‘old dispensations.’ The journey in and with God, essentially can only be made alone. That’s scary. Not just because it threatens the individual fixed worldly identity we have of ourselves. Not just because it threatens the political order or economics of the day which charm us into organised collective. The journey also calls us to honour qualities of vulnerability and openness. If we witness violence, gratuitously or for real on a daily basis or live with its raw scarred implications in a personal way, then being vulnerable risks exposure to the very real threat of being smashed to pieces. That’s what is so special about these three magi. They recognised that the journey in God is fraught. If we dig deep enough into our psyche we see that destroying is a capacity we all have. The more power or influence we have, the greater and wider the impact of breakage on others will be. They foresaw the potential in a King who was prepared to maintain his throne of power at any cost, to want to destroy this. When looked at straight (and not backwards and fixed as we do from the 21st century), everything about the meaning of the Nativity seems to hang fragile. Outwardly it may look serene, but there’s real inner whirlwind and potential for chaos here. No one person alone could have seen the bigger picture. Except God. And then it was God who chose for the Word, upon birth, to be laid in an animal trough. Wisdom asks for divestment. The beginning of Wisdom asks for divestment even of wisdom itself. The three magi, in terms of worship, didn’t think in worldly terms. Though essentially alone on the craziest of path, in their letting go they found fellow companions also seeking a new wisdom. Together they were drawn to Christ who didn’t think in worldly terms either. Christ mixed with D grade people as much as A grade. Because he didn’t think in terms of academic standards. He mixed with people from places of accommodation that had one star rating as much as five star, or even no star. He didn’t think in terms of wealth. He didn’t think in terms of difference, in terms of race, class, culture or religion. Or the qualities of different types of Christmas Cake. He didn’t come to bring about an easeful existence. He thought in terms of relationship and personhood. In terms of getting it wrong and stuffing up, and saying sorry. Healing and a capacity to be at one in and with our environment is what mattered to him. At the end of Job, that great book of rage and rumour, Job says to God: ‘You told me: Listen and let me do the talking; Let me ask the questions, You give the answers.’ At this point Job is at his most open. Before talk, listen. Before wisdom, listen. Questions must be put into this listening space. Answers can only come from here. Listening precedes wisdom. Or wisdom risks losing itself in rumour and make believe. The story of Jesus becomes one that is shaped by a relational compassion and forgiveness, because here is the capacity to be wounded but also to know that something much deeper is holding you. The birth of Jesus, as witnessed by the magi, demands that we look and listen without illusion, that we protect and honour all that is vulnerable. And we see here a way of life that will be set down not on ‘crusts of heresay, crumbs of rumour’ but on God’s terms; a living and loving God.

Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons by Rowan Williams (SPCK 2018) Available now at St Peter’s Bookroom $26.95 Reviewed by Carol O’Connor 'I cannot know myself alone. I cannot invent language for myself: I have to be spoken to. I cannot picture myself as a body unless I am seen and engaged with.' Language. Imagination. Relationality. If there were three words I would choose to describe themes which consistently run through all Rowan Williams’ writings, (at least those books I’ve read and addresses I’ve listened to) and which capture my attention again and again, it would be these. His recently released Being Human continues the series Being Disciples and Being Christian, and doesn’t disappoint. For again Williams finds that beautiful balanced modulation between his personal voice - ‘if you see what I mean’ and ‘to put it in plain English’ - and his keen, sharp theological note: ‘…how we talk about God as God, is not only to do with clarifying and purifying what we say about God, it is also, crucially, a purifying of what we say about ourselves.’ Our lives don’t begin alone, but with the capacity to imagine the other. It’s only via our faculty of imagination that we are enabled to experience empathy, be attuned to and speak with one another. These three words: language, imagination and relationality are not entirely separate or reducible forms. For a human being to flourish we need some sense of each happening interdependently, like a dance, inside and outside ourselves: Speaking changes things. To say something introduces new possibilities. To be conscious, to be part of this narrative, relational, localised life….is to be a speaker….an agent inviting listening, interpretation and so on. Speaking changes things…. Our first relationship begins with the ground of the sacred, of love, in God. Rowan Williams draws on St Augustine for this foundational theological assumption. For me, this understanding only became comprehensible from the decision many years ago to take the risk and attempt to live out from this relationship. As Williams understands, it’s something that can be only apprehended in the living out of, rather than theology as an academic exercise. In referring to Augustine he says: The deeper I go into the attempt to understand myself, who and what I am, the more I find that I am already grasped, addressed, engaged with. I can’t dig deep enough in myself to find an abstract self that’s completely divorced from relationship. Not only does Rowan Williams reaffirm my own growing understanding about the importance of being a relational being, he has the knack of furthering my imaginative capacity for this. He helps further our understanding about what this means. As I have a relationship in and with God, so do others: When I look around, my neighbour is also always somebody who is already in a relation with God before they’re in a relation with me. That means that there’s a very serious limit on my freedom to make of my neighbour what I choose, because, to put it very bluntly, they don’t belong to me and their relation to me is not all that is true of them, or even the most important thing that is true of them. So, it’s about loosening that confidence that we have control or power over others. As Christians we each premise our life on relationship with our Creator, in other words, ‘a relationship outside my power and control.’ Such a relationship brings with it the experience of reverence which overflows into a regard for human dignity. And, when we claim human dignity …..we’re not just asserting that somewhere in us there is something making imperative demands. We’re trying to affirm a place, a proper place in relation with others. We’re trying to affirm that we are embedded in relationship. I am, and I have value because I am seen by and engaged with love…always and unconditionally the love of God. The dignity that we search to have for each other is an ‘echo’ of this ‘permanent attitude of love, attention, respect which the Creator gives to what is made.’ And the more we realise that dignity, lessen reducibility of knowledge to a set of facts or strategies, learn how to walk around this environment and imagine or postulate possible resistances, the more then can we begin to expand our own emotional environment. In other words, we start to get the bigger picture. Rowan Williams acknowledges in Chapter 3 that some of the books he’s written have ‘not always been easy reading.’ He has been considerate of his wide readership in his introduction by clearly and helpfully outlining the content of each chapter. At the end of each chapter he also includes two brief personal questions for reflection or discussion. Our own our theological engagement and spiritual considerations about what it means to be human, matters. This is an invitation to dialogue, not pedagogy. Compared with previous works such as On Augustine, Arius or Dostoyevsky Rowan Williams is speaking less abstrusely and more plainly in Being Human. However, he does not pander to a reader’s desire simply to be spoon fed. For good things, and this includes deep understanding, requires the taking of time. Learning a craft or art takes time, gaining wisdom too takes time but we have become ‘short termist, almost by compulsion these days.’ For Williams this is where ‘difficulty’ becomes a gift, that it can teach us patience with other people, with other cultures, the nature of challenge helps us learn that building solidarity and communion takes time: I think difficulty is good for us….difficulty…obliges us to take time. The more time we take, the more our discovery is likely to turn into habit and into inhabiting. The less time we take with something, the easier we find something to resolve, map and digest, the less value, the less significance it will have. Rowan Williams knows how in his prose to make us think hard and knows the value of this as a learned habit. The place where thought is brought out from and goes to rest is silence. Although the final chapter is on the transfiguring of Jesus at the Ascension, ‘the extraordinary fact that our humanity in all its variety and its vulnerability has been taken by Jesus into the heart of the divine life’, the penultimate chapter pauses on the value of silence as intrinsic and necessary to our maturity as human beings. Of all its extraordinary features, the good as well as the dehumanising (for ‘Silence like a cancer grows’ The Sound of Silence which Williams takes pains to point out is not the sense of silence he is referring to) the silence he references which I resonate with is that one of being ‘taken beyond the familiar and the controllable.’ It’s that uncomfortable moment when silence is necessary because it feels like the only authentic response. But it also feels like it’s taking us into strange new territory. For Williams, this silence of ‘I can’t domesticate, I can’t get on top of this’ is part of growth into human maturity. This is enormously hard work because it opens us up as Christians, to those things we face that we can’t control. Imagine this: the silence of Jesus before Pontius Pilate. ‘Don’t you know I have the power to crucify you or release you?’ Pilate says, in St John’s Gospel, and he then is ‘amazed’ by the silence of Jesus. For Williams this is not because Jesus has been ‘shut up’ but ‘opened up.’ It’s a place that all human beings can come to share: ‘it’s not my speech and your silence, it’s everybody’s silence in the face of these deep and difficult aspects of being human - and of course everybody’s silence in the face of the utterly unmanageable, which is God.’ Before God we are all silent. Language, imagination, relationality, and of course the silence-dipped-spirit working around and inside us, can be a helpful way in to understanding what it means to be human, and also what it means to be attuned to God. Being human means having the capacity to be in relationship with our Creator, and the gift of language means we can dare to speak of this relationship. And it also means our sensitivity and listening engagement to risk sharing and nurturing this language amongst one another.

'Lay out the structure you already have, x-ray it for a hairline fracture, find it, and think about it for a week or a year; solve the insoluble problem.' (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life) This year I’ve been wrestling with an insoluble problem: What exactly is Facebook? I still haven’t solved it, not by half, but I continue to x-ray it. I’ve been on Facebook for nearly twelve months now. I continue to find this river run of words, pictures, digital threads and memes, which course down the middle of my screen when I log in, inexplicably compelling. And enigmatic. Before I go on with this blog, I’ll be upfront. I take Facebook seriously. And yet like any medium of communication, particularly social, doesn’t Facebook deserve to be taken seriously? Shouldn’t all our relationships in this world be taken seriously, digital or otherwise? Facebook has become by now familiar territory - although some of the more adroit moves still elude me. And like life itself, it’s never to be presumed upon. But for me to this day, when I post, comment or Like, I still feel as if there is a shadow lurking to snatch me into a Dark Pit - no doubt because of past and present voices of warning about interactions with social media. And sometimes, I long to be that carefree witty sprite, lively dancing through waves of posts, just as some of my Facebook friends. They seem so resilient, light-hearted in their pirouette with words and emoticons. But really, are they so? Being on Facebook is to be in a space dangerously charged with all sorts of projections. Rowan Williams, when he was Bishop of Monmouth gave a series of talks for the World Meditation Centre, which later became basis for his book Silence and Honey Cakes. He spoke about the ‘person’ as distinct from the ‘individual’. The person is the one before us with whom we are in relationship. The person has a wholeness, or at least an aware inner brokenness, that enables herself or himself to know connection with self and with others. And also, with God. Individuals, however, are governed by ideas about consumer choices; relationships are secondary to entity. For an individual, the world is seen in terms of market values, which are seen as more worthwhile than the search for deeper meaning. For a person, to move in the world is to journey with an evolving truth. For an individual, truth chops and changes according to fashion. For me, this is one hairline fracture on Facebook. The flat glossy surface of the screen so readily veils the person. It belies truth. Persons can seem few; individuals many. Between you and me, I and Thou, there can feel to be (glossy though it is) a wall of impenetrable morass. This is not to deny the intricacies that already exist in other relationships. And not to deny there are persons who post and comment. But in the world of Facebook this distinction between person and individual is exacerbated. I decided to go on Facebook to give St Peter’s Bookroom a profile on social media. A bookshop presence requires a personal account. So I now have a Carol profile, and operate a Bookroom one. When I started on Facebook I made rules for myself. Unknown landscapes need markers. The directive was one post per day, relevant to the Bookroom or Parish, on the Bookroom Facebook page. Rules certainly can be broken but only in exceptional circumstances. Sometimes I share a meme about libraries or bookshops or books generally. Nothing much was posted on my personal page until September. Something then shifted inside me. Now I feature what I have come to call my Splats, small haiku-like word poems. Deliberately, there are no pictures with Splats. It’s about the beauty of the word. A reminder as well that words don’t always need to be dressed up with an image to speak to the heart. And these words are ordinary, come inside from any one of us. These are my Splats - what are yours? Friends don’t have to engage with Facebook posts and don’t have to post. Its landscape can be treated as a newspaper; simply read. There is no rule that states: Thou must post. But in posting my word poems I now feel even more like Alice falling down a rabbit hole. And Facebook seems to be all about falling and the journey itself, not so much the arriving. Plummeting down a tunnel of posts that can slow down or speed up, determined by where one stops the mouse or finger. My own mind can elongate or shrink depending upon which post portal I choose to engage and share time with at any given point. It’s an album that feels endless and transient. But the pixilations are etched firmly together. And Posts, anyone’s, can randomly reappear; months or years afterwards. Facebook is not everyone’s cup of tea. Who comes to this tea party? My pixilated Facebook page is a world of incredible richness, diversity and wit, humour and generosity, alive to the spirit of life. It can be a listening place: helping people through loss, illness, loneliness. Prayers for healing can be asked for. It is a place of celebration: family events, personal accomplishments, birthdays, ordinations, weddings, reunions, anniversaries, trips overseas. It is a place to commemorate. It can be a place to share blogs, sermons, articles on politics and human interest to attract discussion. Current major world events, such as the recent US election, can dominate discussion. There can be confrontation too about these world issues, values, insights, plagues of opinions, longing, complaints. It’s a world certainly vulnerable to abuse. Vulnerable to the dissemination of misinformation, exposed to the emotional manipulation others; instructions to Share if You Care. Facebook itself has the power to moderate and ban users for a period of time. Usually this is for derogatory language. Most often though Facebook self-regulates. A Friend simply goes into reaction and withdraws for a period of time, or Unfriends another. More hairline fractures. There are Friends on Facebook I haven’t actually ever met, the Friend whose real human face I have never seen, whose voice I have never heard, who is not wholly ‘person’ for me. And yet Facebook and I have colluded in constructing their profile and investing in them the power to Unfriend me. In this environment I too am categorised as choice. Facebook assumes by its very topography that Friends are disposable. Here, our views or differences, once expressed seem very quickly to become identified with our personhood. Judgements abound. In terms of abuse, we do need protection. The need for boundaries is unequivocal. However, the human factor, dispensations we have for known people’s moods, depression, grief reactions, and understandings of another’s foibles, are in abeyance when you haven’t yet met a Friend. We have only our known internal experience to move with. And judgements based on mutual Friends. Acquaintances on Facebook, those people we have met and know a little about already, are somewhat different. Sometimes they can be sensed like brushstrokes from an impressionist painting. More of their personality is coloured in by the lines they draw on the screen. But, just as with those not known, when I Like what they post, am I liking something only because it’s known in me? Whose face is it that I am actually seeing? Am I seeing only myself in this great swirl of social media? When I see a Profile image is it only my own face, again and again, in various multitudinous ways? When I Like, is it the post heading itself, the content in the post, the person, or the projected idea of the person that I am liking? As in life itself, on Facebook there is no such thing as a level playing field. How heavily ‘agendaed’, fraught with power play or emotional needs, how wounded is it? Reputation and public standing precede, even Facebook. I feel dismay at myself when I realise that I have descended into jealousy when a Friend posts her afternoon trip into the countryside - and within an hour receives over ninety (90) Likes. Defensively, I boast that I have Friends in Liked places. Likewise my paranoia is quickened when I comment on a Friend’s post and receive no Like. Or I am mortified when I post a comment and can think of at least three different ways of reading that comment - only one of which was intended. And oppressed by the delusion that all my Friends are simultaneously reading that comment at that very moment. And, when I post a Splat I regularly ask, is this the Splat that will launch a thousand Likes? I confess to having phoned my husband on occasion to ask for at least one Like. And that’s just it. Facebook is another mirror of the wounded self. Where is any one of us located in this billion, billion pixilated universe? Facebook is a public space but it really only exists inside the head. Sometimes it feels like a sort of restless heaving of the collective subconscious. Engagement with it is one more version of a First World hit, a caffeinated screen shot. But Facebook can be more than this. Annie Dillard’s words and Rowan William’s distinction both point us back toward Jesus: Who is my neighbour? On Facebook I am asked: Look for the hairline fracture. Look for where the face of the person is revealed. Notice that thread where frisson and conflict ends with reconciliation - not shredded demented disintegration. Look for where vulnerability or brokenness is apparent, instead of the flashy. Celebrate and commemorate life. There are faces behind each of these posts - where is that face? I spoke to someone recently who has just culled his 2600 friends. How can anyone talk with even a quarter this number of Friends? How can I already relate properly to the fraction of Friends on my page? I received via Australia Post recently an actual hand written letter from a Friend and I had to look her up on Facebook to see who she was. On Facebook, where do the posts of a stranger sketch a face? I continue to be challenged to try and hear the voice of Friends I have never actually heard in the world as the voice of my neighbour. My Facebook Friends are multi-cut diamonds. They are facets revealing spectral hues and creating multiple rays of light. Annie Dillard and Rowan Williams challenge me to seek out how their comments, words and images point away from themselves and toward some greater coherent centre. There is a ground of God here where connection is dynamic. A place too, where Alice can simply travel down to Wonderland and be Alice for a bit, free to enjoy a Mad Hatter’s tea party with a wonderful variety of Facebook Friends and real life friends and family as well.