This is the first of three addresses by Carol O’Connor given at a Quiet Day, directed by Carol and musician and spiritual director Cath Connelly, for the Institute for Spiritual Studies. The title of the Quiet Day was from Psalm 72: ‘Put your ear to the ground and listen.’ The Day was held at St James Anglican Church, Point Lonsdale, on Saturday the 25th of March 2017. My speech - may it praise you without flaw: May my heart love you, King of heaven and earth. My speech - may it praise you without flaw: Make it easy for me, pure Lord, to do you all service and to adore you. My speech - may it praise you without flaw: Father of all affection, hear my poems and my speech. Irish poem, 12th century or later (Davies 260) In his latest book God With Us, Rowan Williams writes: Christian theology is not a set of granite monuments that you walk around with your guidebook, ticking them off one by one as you see the great blocks of Sound Teaching. Christian theology is a more fluid, constantly moving, constantly shifting process. When you look very hard at one set of meanings they dissolve into another. And so it continues, around and around in the opposite of a vicious circle. The cross is a sign, but never just a sign because it makes a difference, whether we know it or not. The cross is a sacrifice, but a sacrifice performed by God, not by us, a sacrifice that changes our hearts. The cross is a victory, but a victory that cannot be understood except as worldly defeat. The cross, you could say, doesn’t stand still. Our understanding, our absorption of its meaning, is always a living process in which one image, one category, again and again moves us into another. (Williams 54-55) Theology is very important, the church can’t function effectively without it, but Rowan Williams is reminding us here that theology is not an end in itself - that good theology helps bring us closer into God’s living reality. For me, the legacy of the early Celtic Christians also reveals to us that the theology of the cross is a ‘fluid’ and ‘living process.’ They too invite us to see the cross of Jesus as a sign, as a sacrifice, as victory in the ways that Rowan Williams mentions here. I hope that today Cath and I can help all of us think a little bit more about the meaning of the cross as something that, though steeped in theology, “does not stand still”. We have stone crosses, but the cross of Jesus, if it’s to mean anything, is a ‘living process’. CROSS AS AN ICON In these three addresses, I will be looking at the cross as an icon: an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible meaning. The implications of the cross of Jesus, for Christians, is actually quite a challenging one. And that’s as it should be. When Jesus says in the synoptic Gospels, take up your cross and follow me, he is not only saying that we need to die to the self, but we die to the self in him. It’s not a very comfortable image this, taking up my own cross, in other words, not running away from my particular pain. But what seems to matter here to Jesus is how you ‘take up’ this cross, how you carry your suffering, whom you follow, and where you take it. And in Cath’s music, and in my words today, I invite us to try and ponder how the cross lives in us, how it manifests in our thinking, actions, our emotions, our bodies. The cross is an outward and visible sign, of an inward and invisible meaning. When we try to look at the Cross through the eyes of the early Celtic Christians, what do they show us? How did they pick up the cross, this Celtic Cross of theirs, and follow Jesus? What can they perhaps teach us about how to carry our suffering and where to take it? GOD’S CALL TO STRETCH I’ve titled this first address: God - the Calling of Love. God’s call is always a call to stretch. At one point when in utter despair St Cuthbert - prior, bishop and hermit at Lindisfarne in the 7th century - is described as stretching his whole body out on the ground in the form of a cross. The God Jesus points us to, is not there to domesticate or possess. Celtic Christians were very aware of God’s call for us continually to broaden our horizons. Looking through the window of cross in the early Celtic Christian world there can be seen three types of ways we are called to stretch spiritually. In each of these addresses I will look at a different way. In this first address, I want to focus on the top part of the cross, which reaches upward. It reminds us that we can stretch up to God, towards the heavens, and ask God to come down to us. ‘May my Creator visit me, my Lord, my King; may my spirit seek him in the everlasting kingdom where he dwells’ (Davies 261) muses an Old Irish hermit dwelling in his small hut. We can be a people who are open to asking for God’s life to be with us here on earth. STRETCHING UPWARD TO GOD & INVOKING GOD DOWN Nowhere do we see this reaching up and supplicating God to come down to us quite like in the form of the Lorica or Breastplate tradition of prayer, which came into being predominantly in Ireland in the late 8th century. These prayers have their origin in texts such as Ephesians 6, are partly private and devotional but also liturgical: morning prayer designed to inspire continuous prayer throughout the day. There are many prayers in this tradition where God’s power and protection is invoked down into a person’s life. The earliest one we have is the Breastplate of Laidcenn (Davies 289-292). In this long poem the poet calls up all the High Powers of Heaven to protect each carefully named part of his body: Deliver my skull, hair-covered head and eyes, Mouth, tongue, teeth, and nostrils, Neck, breast, side, and limbs, Joints, fat, and two hands. he says in just one verse; and he finishes the long poem with these words: So that leaving the flesh I may escape the depths, And be able to fly to the heights, And by the mercy of God be borne with joy To be made anew in his kingdom on high. The Lorica most of us know is the Breastplate of St Patrick: ‘I bind unto myself this day….’ So each verse begins in one of many translations. Not only here is the poet shown to be invoking the Trinity to give him wisdom and power and guidance, not only too the glory of creation itself (the moon, the lightning, the wind) to encircle him, but he contextualises his own life’s story in God’s story, the story of Jesus, and the apostles and patriarchs. The Breastplate of St Patrick is an incantation. A kind of Christian-Druidic spell is being bound around the poet, and in turn as we sing it, us, to ward off evil. The tone of these Lorica poems has always struck me as heroic. Audacious, even. Whether these battles were inner spiritual ones or outer in the world, these prayers cannot fail to stir the soul. It feels like the monk is setting off on a great Celtic saga. Unlike Celtic cultic religion however, this is not now a God who resides in a localised natural place and whose domicile is underground; heaven is placed in the upper realm. Also, although God is King in heaven, God can be appealed to personally to give us a mantle of protection. In Celtic mythology, Gods could always interfere in people’s lives. But here now is a Christian God who is personable to the point of investing interest in every little detail of a person. We each have a relationship with God and there is no part of our body the monk wants left exposed to ‘foul demons’, no part that God too would want to leave vulnerable to wounding. Not all monks thought themselves quite so elegantly heroic in their relationship with God. The perils of life and the need for God’s help weren’t always imagined on such a grand scale. Human flaws too were openly acknowledged in many poems. On the Flightiness of Thought Shame on my thoughts, how they stray from me! I fear great danger from this on the Day of eternal Judgment. During the Psalms they wander on a path that is not right: they run, they distract, they misbehave before the eyes of the great God. Through eager assemblies, through companies of lewd women, through woods, through cities - swifter they are than the wind. One moment they follow ways of loveliness, and the next ways of riotous shame - no lie! Without a ferry or a false step they cross every sea: Swiftly they leap in one bound from earth to heaven. They run - not a course of great wisdom - near, far: Following paths of great foolishness they reach their home. Though one should try to bind them or put shackles on their feet, they are neither constant nor inclined to rest a while. Neither the edge of a sword nor the stripe of lash will subdue then; slippery as an eel’s tail they elude my grasp. […] Rule this heart of mine, O swift God of the elements, that you may be my love, and that I may do your will! That I may reach Christ with his chosen companions, that we may be together: They are neither fickle nor inconstant - they are not as I am. This poem, coming from the Old Irish (Davies 262), shows us that despite our intentions, our scattered, fragmented thinking can quickly take us all over the place. And especially to the wrong places. The request to God is to be focused, single minded: ‘Rule this heart of mine, O swift God of the elements, that you may be my love, and that I may do your will!’ In this poem we hear that even what we think matters in our personal relationship with God. Sin here is when a thread of the delicately wrought, finely tuned relationship we have with God has broken. And Celtic Christians acknowledge that we break these threads all the time and it’s all too human to become fragmented in our thoughts and actions. It seems to be intrinsic to our very nature. Even with the best of intentions, our thoughts ‘one moment they follow the ways of loveliness, and the next ways of riotous shame.’ We reach up to God and ask for help so we can be steadied. As the cross has a centre where the two axes meet, we have an inner ground we can be drawn back to. ‘All alone in my little hut’ begins the poem of one Old Irish hermit. Our inner ground is like that place alone in our little hut; it is a place we can come to again and again, in prayer, in meditation, in stillness. Here we seek and find a more balanced, integrated self. In the poetry of the early Celtic Christians sometimes they lament and feel anguish for their manifold sins. But in reaching up in their longing to be in God’s dwelling and feasting from God’s table, they are able to draw down the love of God down into their hearts. SIN AND FINDING OUR WAY HOME TO GOD It may seem a strange place to begin this day of retreat, my talking about ‘sin.’ But it’s very much a recurring theme in the poetry and stories of the Celtic Christians. They teach us that this breaking apart from God is a valid starting point for a much more mature human relationship with God. Owning this place of our humanity is a beginning to learn what the depths of a loving relationship really entails - not only with God, but with each other. How do we find the bridge back to God, to our inner ground and that place with Christ and his chosen companions? In the Celtic Penitentials, this need for our continual realignment toward God in our lives is fundamental. From around the 6th century each monastery formulated its own book of Penitentials. They listed there, with punctilious detail, penances for sins ranging from how to handle issues such as failing to guard the host carefully so that a mouse eats it, or giving someone a beverage in which a mouse or weasel is found dead, to penances for all sorts of sexual transgressions. Some of these books, such as the Penitential of Columbanus, were very austere. However, underlying all of them are very practical and pastoral concerns for a person and a community’s health and wellbeing. The need for a soul friend or spiritual guide, an anam cara, is emphasised. The Penitential of Cummean emphasises that personal considerations too be taken into account and concludes that it is imperative after any penance that there is teaching and instruction and the penitent knows that he is forgiven, and is once more favourable to God. Essential here is this knowledge that it’s not only us who build the bridge back to God. God calls us and Love comes to meet us. We are called constantly through these challenges to know that we are being drawn into deeper relationship with God. It’s not simply about breaking a thread of connection with God, then repenting and getting on with life. Broken threads are the call to know even stronger, deeper, more worthwhile and life-giving bonds with God. This is an ongoing process throughout our lives. BEING CALLED BY GOD So, how does God’s love call us into life? A book that I’ve enjoyed dipping into preparing these addresses has been David Adam’s : Fire of the North: The illustrated Life of St Cuthbert. He has based it on many sources, including the Venerable Bede. The story here of this saint’s life really begins with the death of St Aidan, described as that ‘heroic monk’ who founded Lindisfarne. The death of St Aidan inspired Cuthbert to follow a call. At that time Cuthbert was shepherd in Northumbria and one night had a weird waking dream. He didn’t really know what it meant and when he described it to his friends, he knew they didn’t get it at all. But he did instinctively know that he was being called to do something. Cuthbert did not know which way to turn. He thought of visiting Kenswith or of going to Lindisfarne - both were easy journeys. He was not sure anyone would understand what was calling him out from following the sheep. He was sure it was not a ‘what’ but Who’. This was not the fates, or destiny, this was a personal call from a personal God. Cuthbert was sure that being a person mattered. Who you are influences what you say - it speaks louder than words. You cannot give yourself to God until you have become someone. This sort of conversation with himself made up his mind. If Aidan had still been alive, Cuthbert would have gone straight to the island of Lindisfarne. He needed no one to convince him that he was being called. With Aidan dead, he would go to Melrose. There were still many holy men who could instruct him by example and in book work on Lindisfarne, but at Melrose was Boisil, a man already famous for his learning and sanctity. Cuthbert made up his mind. Then he realised that, though he sought the kingdom of God, he must first return to his home. Kenswith must be told of his decision and of his whereabouts, or she would have the whole area searched for him. Looked at carefully, this story (Adam 26) shows us that Cuthbert knows four things: It’s a “Who” that calls, not a “what”. There’s the invitation for a relationship. Secondly, this relationship is personal and unique. Only he and the One calling can work on this relationship. Thirdly, Cuthbert must listen. And listen with discernment. And fourth, this personal relationship in God, by virtue of the grace of listening, will mean change. It will set the ground of a new relationship for him with other people and the world which he inhabits. But, there are actually five things: fifth, he must immediately go home and tell Kenswith, his foster mother and teacher. In all this we are asked to hear the call and meditate, but the response starts from the place where we are at. Stay in and be faithful to the commitments of the present moment. ‘With the drawing of this Love, and the voice of this calling’ wrote TS Eliot in Four Quartets. Love draws us toward Love’s very self; and this drawing into Love then gives each of us our particular voice. In many stories of the saints’ lives in the Celtic Christian tradition, there is this sense of God calling and drawing a person into their very own personhood. And this is something that is happening in God’s time, not ours. We can’t make it happen. We can only stay open. But, there is the hearing of a call, and then a unique response. A person is invited to have a very real coherency and integrity when in relationship with God. And this calling is being continually renewed. Columbanus became a white martyr in choosing to leave Ireland and found monastic houses in Europe. Columba was sent into exile from Ireland as penance, but he went on to found the Abbey on Iona. Though there are poems that show his longing to return to Ireland, his inner personhood very much became that ‘little dove’ his name signifies. St Bridget, foundress of a monastery in Kildare, became also a healer and miracle worker. St Brendan became the sea-faring navigator travelling around many islands with his Brothers to seek the promised Land of the Saints. The stories of all these saints’ lives have a shape and an identity that changed and developed as they responded to Love’s call. For them, how you act and what you choose to do arise from who you are, and they show us that a preparedness to walk the path in faith toward whom you are being called to be, is to journey toward God. Only as you walk in the present wake of this call, and walk with awareness, do you begin to see the unfolding of your own becoming in life. KNOWING OUR FORM But we can’t follow a call if we don’t have some sense of who we are. We need to know ourselves before we can begin to give expression of our self in the world. We need to know this character stuff, this clay, of which each of us is made. Otherwise we become at risk of living in dislocation, co-dependence, or absurdity. In St Patrick’s Confession, or the Declaration of the Great Works of God, a work by Murchu in the 6th century about the life of St Patrick, before Patrick tells of the ‘many blessings and great grace which the Lord saw fit to give me in the land of my captivity’ (i.e. Ireland), he opens with the words: ‘I am Patrick. I am a sinner…I am the son of the deacon Calpornius…’ He knows from the beginning who he is. I am Patrick. But later in the text he goes on to show that there are very real times in life where he just had to sit in the present confusion of not knowing what he is called to do. When he went back home from Ireland to his parents in Wales, they wanted him to stay. And he describes himself going through anguish. He doesn’t know what to do. It’s not until he has really worked through this, by means of dreams and prayer and a felt sense of the spirit in him, that he found the calling, that right desire, to go back to Ireland. For St Patrick, whilst leaving Wales a second time meant heartbreaking loss and leaving behind primary family groups, it also meant deeper understanding of the possibilities of who he was called to become. And this meant a terrible risk and facing really big fears. The Brothers likewise with St Brendan are frequently quaking with fear at the sea creatures they are encountering. But it also meant trust. St Brendan knows this when he tells them to quieten down: trusting themselves and trusting the process of life in God is imperative on their way to The Land of Promise. Staying true to their commitment to God was most important. Columba went into exile for two reasons, the main one being having caused a battle over a psalter he copied from St Finnian. It’s the first known copyright dispute. His exile was a penance premised on his need to re-forge a new relationship in God, the need to find reconciliation with God for the many men who died in a battle he was responsible for. Celtic Christians teach us that the truth of our identity and subsequently all relationships in the world with friend or stranger, in known lands or foreign, are drawn from this one source only - God’s calling. FUSION OF TWO NEW FORMS WITH CELTIC CHRISTIANS: TRIUNE GOD & CELTIC CROSS TO MAKE NEW FORMS What I have always loved about Celtic Christianity is that during these centuries identifiable streams of Christianity - Roman, as well as the Desert Mothers and Fathers from Egypt (whose influence reached Ireland by sea) - creatively moved into a culture based on cultic practices and possessors of a rich separate mythology. I’ll talk a little more about this in my third address. This movement reveals a much bigger process of God’s calling for groups of people to stretch and grow spiritually into each other. It certainly wasn’t always easy or as smooth as we may like to think. And this type of reaching out, whilst simultaneously welcoming in, is something we struggle with very much in our contemporary world. But I’ll finish this first address with two examples where some of these forms came together for the Celtic Christians. For the early Celts, the theology of a Triune God was one that they could resonate with. Being primarily an oral culture, the Celts believed the number 3 was a useful number for remembering in teaching. There was a very popular form of poetry called the Triad which blended well with Christian teaching: Three keys that unlock thoughts: drunkenness, trustfulness, love. Three coffers whose depth is not known: the coffers of a chieftain, of the Church, of a privileged poet. Three things that ruin wisdom: ignorance, inaccurate knowledge, forgetfulness. St Columba’s Monastic Rule is based on this form of the Triad (Adam 31): Three labours in the day - prayers, work and reading. Take not food until you are hungry. Sleep not till you feel the desire. Speak not, except on business. So the Trinity itself was a triune form of God that the Celts could understand. For them the earth had three mothers. This richness of understanding concerning the beginnings of creation and wisdom in terms of triads, could be brought into a new learning of a God of Love being three persons in one. Secondly, the Christian God who calls us also asks us to know the form of the cross. For an image that primarily consists of two lines crossing, there are many different ways that Christian communities have come to depict this cross. It doesn’t “stand still”. There are also a number of different Irish crosses, including St Bridget’s cross, which was made out of reeds. But the most well-known one is the Cross with the circle in the centre: “The great O of creation … the circle of the world and the cross of redemption brought together into one whole”. (De Waal 9) Whatever reason the Celtic Christians chose to depict the cross this way - whether it was an inheritance from the Celt’s image of the circle meaning Unity in life or the infinity of the sun - there is something very distinctive about this cross. The geometry and the compass of a circle is such that the middle point is equidistant from all other points. The circle on the cross depicts a God whose circumference is nowhere and centre is everywhere. And at the centre of the cross, at the very centre of suffering, is the cross point of God’s love holding us. Father of all affection, hear my poems and my speech says our 12th century monastic poet, quoted at the beginning of this address. This monk is comfortable enough in his relationship with God to ask Him to come down and listen to his own response to God’s call. Love calls and the monk responds with his own craft. And it’s this listening response as we take up our cross with Jesus and sit in the space of silence, that I will talk about in my second address. Sources Adam, David. Fire of the North: The illustrated life of St Cuthbert, with photographs and drawing by Jean Freer. SPCK, 1993 Davies, Oliver. Celtic spirituality. (Classics of Western Spirituality) Paulist Press, 1999 De Waal, Esther. A world made whole : rediscovering the Celtic tradition. Fount, 1991 Williams, Rowan. God with us: SPCK, 2017

Subversive by Blessing - What does it mean to live in a spiritually expansive world? ….beyond the threshold of want where all our diverse straining can come to wholesome ease. John O’Donohue The Irish Celtic writer John O’Donohue emphasises in his book of blessings To Bless This Space Between Us, that life is a constant flow of emergence. In his blessing For The Unknown Self he describes how our ‘unknown self’ calls us to evolve. We live in the place of possibility, of thresholds which are possibilities into new worlds. He teaches that our ‘unknown self’ dwells in us gently, kindly, knows our primeval heart and has the capacity in dreams to create ‘many secret doors / Decorated with pictures of your hunger.’ But what premise can this rest on, what shape can it possibly even outline in this first part of the 21st century, where the world seems to have a sense that it’s shrinking not opening, where the notion of ‘truth’ seems vague and slippery, not creative and life giving, where abundance seems to be the exponential increase of our non-biologically degradable garbage or arms of war, and the growing list of endangered species? Viewed from one lens, the future of our civilisation looks increasingly bleak, fraught and full of suffering. In this context, the unknown self can seem to harbour only states of unease and anxiety. This book of blessings was John O’Donohue’s final before he unexpectedly died young. In it he wrote, ironically now, that ‘we never see the script of our lives nor do we know what is coming towards us, or why our life takes on this particular shape or sequence’. For him although ‘to be in the world is to be distant from the homeland of wholeness….we are confined by limitation and difficulty….’ he also suggests a deeper recognition that ‘when we bless we are enabled somehow to go beyond our present frontiers and reach into the source. A blessing awakens future wholeness…’ We are physical beings subject to the laws of nature, but the future stands on an unmade threshold full of potential. Blessings, he says, are ‘different from a hug or a salute….(they) open a different door in human encounter. One enters into the forecourt of the soul, the source of intimacy and the compass of destiny.’ John O’Donohue understood that primarily a blessing is about relationship: with the self, with God, with one another. And blessings are about wholeness. Blessings seek wholeness of the self and community without denying the brokenness - the reality of slippery truth, the fact of the degradation of our planet. They reach into a source beyond our present frontiers and do this for the sake of wholeness and healing. To reach into a source is to live with recognition of the self as being in process: ‘we are distant from the homeland of wholeness.’ It is an old truth that we’ve almost forgotten that the best things in life take time, we need the leaning in of time to form who we are becoming. The gift of time actually is the enabling vehicle which evolves us. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, warns that we need to remember that we are shaped by time, otherwise we are in danger of losing of what it is to be human. So, the practice of silence and reflection enables us to ‘enter into that forecourt of the soul,’ that source of intimacy which enables possibility to emerge. Rowan Williams goes on to say: ‘Time is a complex and rich gift; it is the medium in which we not only grow and move forward, but also constructively return and resource - literally re-source - ourselves.’ There are two Greek words translated as blessing or to bless or blessed in the New Testament. The first one is eulogeo: to speak well of God, to ask God’s blessing on a thing - to praise, to invoke, to consecrate something and set it apart for its ongoing wellness in God. Luke 24:30 ‘He took bread and blessed it, and broke, and gave to them’; Mark 11:9 ‘Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord’; Matthew 5:44 ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you.’ The second word is markarios - this is the one we most often translate as ‘blessed’ from the Beatitudes: it means to be a partaker of God and the fullness of God. Makarios in particular has that deep sense of joy and grace. Why does the word ‘may’ often appear when we speak a blessing? John O’Donohue tells us, ‘it is a word of benediction. It imagines and wills the fulfilment of desire. In the invocation of our blessings here, the word may is the spring through which the Holy Spirit is invoked to surge into presence and effect. The Holy Spirit, is the subtle presence and secret energy behind every blessing…’ The word ‘may’ is our link between heaven and earth. The biblical world Heaven, as explained by English theologian Paula Gooder, was not understood as a spiritual place, over there in the distance and somewhere I or you go to when we die. We have developed a very different understanding of Heaven because we no longer share the ancient cosmology that the earth is flat. Biblical understanding was in fact that heaven is not an eternal realm far, far away from earth, but a spatial created realm very close to earth, and created to be alongside earth. The early Celtic Christians also believed that Heaven is right here, and right now. Their sense of ‘thin places’ was resonant with the closeness of Heaven alongside earth. To employ the word ‘may’ in terms of benediction, in terms of speaking well of, is to affirm that this spatial realm of Heaven is right close alongside earth and the ongoing work of the spirit between the two. It’s important here to note that blessings recognise God’s goodness in the world, rather than establish it. So when you bless something, you are not magically transforming it. Contemporary English theologian Andrew Davison in his book Blessing which has inspired my own thinking and forms the basis for this reflection, explains, ‘blessings will not be about God’s holiness in itself….. We do not make God holy but we can help our world to make a better attempt at recognising God’s holiness and keeping it in mind.’ So blessings do not make God great; they proclaim God’s greatness. Blessings are about speaking well of God; they ‘call out’ if you like, God’s presence in the world. They ‘call out’ in order to show that light which already exists, but has still yet to be fully revealed. And when we bless a place or a person, a vocation with this understanding we are setting them out on a path which recognises their ongoing relationship in and with God. So, in blessing, we acknowledge the closeness of heaven to earth and that God’s action is caught up in the process of well making in our world. God seeks wholeness and works for the good (in an ontological sense) here on earth. But we also acknowledge that God doesn’t play havoc with laws of science or our physical embodiment. When we bless a person before they have an operation it is so that they may be healed - if not in body, then in mind; we bless someone before they die so they transition in peace to eternal rest and the hope of rising in Glory; we bless a house when newly occupied, so that those who live under its roof may enjoy ongoing hospitality and love. These blessings are a part of the redemptive process in the world. But they don’t deny that tragedies and suffering and de-humanisation will continue to happen. The violence in the world, the uncertainty, the suffering doesn’t go away. But blessing does affect the way we encounter them and move within and alongside them. So how is it that I have come to believe that ‘blessing’ is subversive in our early 21st century world? Coming from the French, the word subversive literally means, ‘from below to turn’. There’s action happening in the world that’s turning everything, but unlike many other actions in the world, this action is happening from below. There’s a deeper urging causing the self to shift. So then, what is it in our life that blessing is coming under and trying to turn? And also where would blessings have us turn toward? Well, here are six suggestions - and here again I acknowledge the work of Andrew Davison in helping shape my own considerations: Firstly, blessings teach us, ‘that all is not entirely well with the world.' We are by nature broken and flawed. We need restoration and healing. Each of these six suggestions in some way deal with how and not what; how we move in the world, how we travel with our outer circumstances - not so much what we have to work with. I’m often struck by how people can take something - an image or a line of poetry - and use it for their own purposes. For example, the poem Invictis by Henly, has a memorable final couplet: ‘I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.’ In 1995 this poem and these lines in particular, were chosen to be the final words spoken by Timothy McVeigh before his execution - he was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people and injured over 680. But during Nelson Mandela’s eighteen year imprisonment at Robben Island prison between 1962-1980 this same poem inspired him to stay alive and dream about what God’s well making in Africa could possibly look like. For Mandela the words brought courage and determination to make Africa free from Apartheid, to make it a more just country through reconciliation and accountability. His premise was on a greater ontological good, and in 1993 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this journey towards national healing. For McVeigh, the words meant the desire to take over control himself on a matter which he considered unjust. Taking on the role as ultimate arbiter, and taking revenge on the Government in such an abhorrent manner completely invalidated any nominal cause he may have had. Mandela and McVeigh both used the same poem, but where for one it was used with a sense of moving alongside God’s purposes for greater good in the world, the other attempted to shrink the world and play god. By acknowledging that we are all linked into much bigger processes in the world, processes that seek through us to bring wholeness rather than revenge or bloodshed, we release ourselves from a terrible bondage. Blessings are subversive because they belong to the broken seeking to emerge into a new wholeness, and are not captive to mastery or self-mastery. Understanding practices of mastery or self-mastery as an education in honing skills and talents can be a great benefit. But wholeness cannot be sought only by learning to have control over who we are or who others are and only by controlling our outer circumstances. To do this would be to necessarily make the world small to our human purposes, and bring on an unbearable burden. Blessings recognise the mystery of healing in God. Because of this, they cut directly through the belief that we must strive to be masters of who we are and what we do. The notion of self-mastery permeates our ‘first world’ culture, established on desire. There are self-mastery business seminars you can attend; self-mastery cards you can purchase to teach how to master compassion, enthusiasm, self-respect; there is a self-mastery board game whose goal is to create your own self-mastery and to regain a sense of equilibrium in your life. These work well as tools of empowerment, but not as ends in themselves. And the pervasiveness of self-mastery is also more subtle than this: there is the desire to perfect the body: the increasing availability of medical procedures (regardless of health risks) so we can become perfectly designed physically. As adults we have access to a range of drugs to help us master our emotions as well as our bodies. I don’t mean here taking drugs that alleviate depression or bipolar, or medical procedures that seek to heal disfigurement. But, the misshapen understanding about the way we have been created that seeks to control the self in attempt to fit an unrealisable idealisation. In fact, a distortion of what it means to be a human being. Blessing not only recognises, but makes a credible space for the reality of our broken and flawed humanity. But how can blessing help us understand our place in the world? Secondly, blessings remind us that what we are given in life is gift; and by this they call us back into the priority of relationships with one another. The world is on loan to us created from a deep well of cosmic Love for creation, and we are each called to live a life of sharing in it. In the Christian Church, unlike some other religions, blessings are not commodities to be bought or sold. You can’t buy a bag of eulogeo or makarios, even at Coles. So much that is thought to be credible in our world is ‘for sale’; worth is judged in terms of its monetary value. To live by the way of blessing subverts the notion that life is premised on acquisition and objectification. They also subvert the notion that we can live only in our heads; they turn us back to the concrete reality of one another. As much as I relish and am hooked into both technology and social media - I recognise they risk taking me away from personal face-to-face interaction with a person into a vicarious head game of avatars. The Face Book ‘wall’ is not a wall at all in any physical sense, but a moving tide of thought posts which operate only in my own head space. Bitcoins are crypto-currencies where transactions are verified by network nodes; they may have power over earth’s resources, but operate only in virtual communities. Advertisements work in the illusory and objectification. Constantly being taken out of our bodies and into head space we risk losing the connection with one another in the embodiment of the physical world. Technology and social media and bitcoins are not in themselves the problem: it’s when they are used to derail what it means to be human. The currency of our lives often only puts money and virtual reality into circulation; however blessings recognise mutuality in relationship to be of more value. They are freely given touchstones which remind us of the giftedness of life itself; that all creation comes from God. In the Gospels Jesus is very present and real to each person he encounters. He stays grounded in the body to the point where he knows when someone touches the hem of his garment. We witness him say ‘no’ to all things that get in the way of direct relationship with one another and with God: he confronted the money changers in the temple who exploited the poor by selling them offerings. He taught that our relationship with God is not to be mediated nor conditional. For relationships to be real they have to be founded on mutuality, on listening, on noticing; breathing in the same space. Time itself is a gift. To hear rightly, that common phrase ‘Bless You’ is to be released into a process, a day by day, moment by moment, realignment toward and in God. In an essay on St Benedict, Rowan Williams says: ‘there are some good things that are utterly inaccessible without the taking of time……good things that only emerge in time as we look and listen, as we accompany a long story in its unfolding….’ So, thirdly, blessings remind us that orientation towards God is a life-long, ever deepening practice which takes time and opens us to being shaped in time. There is no Manna From Heaven Fast Food outlet or One Stop Blessing Franchise. To live in the spirit of blessing is challenging work. We are so often resistant to what it means to being shaped by time. And yet it would be an absurd notion to listen to the fastest version of The Moonlight Sonata or receive the whole of the musical Into the Woods by Sondheim in five minutes. Perhaps it’s the Beatitudes most of all in the Gospels which give us food to really sit down with and chew over. Their very subversive directives demand our taking of time even to begin to understand the direction they are hinting. Classicist and Hebrew scholar Sarah Ruden refers to this passage in the Gospels as a poem on ‘Blessingnesses.’ She explains that the ‘Greek speaking people in the wider Roman Empire very likely experienced this passage as sort of chant.’ with each line divided into two parts. Rhythmically in the Greek, the first part of each line ‘yields’ to the second. Thus, ‘…The pounding comes in the second halves of the Beatitude’s lines, until there are no longer any distinct lines.’ To me, each line reads like a Zen Koan. Eugene Peterson translates the first line in Matthew’s version: 'You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.' This is a line to ponder. Again, it’s only in the sitting with, giving time to, interrogating each of Peterson's translated lines, that they can begin to make sense. By their very implacable tone they call us to remember what it is essential in our lives with one another: authenticity, mercy, truth, peace, groundedness. So fourthly, blessings are concerned with what is essential, and they remind us to give thanks. In the Christian mass the church service is centered around the Eucharist. This is the giving to us of what is essential - the bread of life. The bread of life, the body of Jesus, the feeding of divine love. ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Yes, give us food for our body. But Lord, give us also your love. We need love. And we need love to shape us. Blessings turn us towards the essential and in this turning they urge us to practice thanksgiving. Therefore, we don’t bless things that are excessive - plasma TVs or the latest Xbox game. They may be fun extras. And we don’t bless those things that go against the common good: weapons of mass destruction. We bless food and rivers and houses; those necessary things we need each day and so often take for granted. And we bless people because healthy relationships are life-giving. Blessings expand the heart to recognise the true worth of what we are given, they remind us about Who the giver is, and draw us deeper into the mystery of life unfolding. So, in all this, who are blessings actually for? One of my favourite Gospel stories is from the Gospel of Luke, 19:3. It’s the story of Zacchaeus, who was a tax collector. He was also very short in stature so that he was not able to see Jesus through the crowd. He ran on ahead and climbed a tree. When Jesus reached the spot he simply said, Come down Zacchaeus I’m going to dine with you today. Christ is the one who is able to see the particular needs of each one of us - be it even the most socially despised tax collector. And for Jesus, everyone is invited to dinner; everyone is invited to the party, to the Eucharistic feast. City people, country people, fringe dwellers. Smelly people, clean people, people with warts and people with perfect complexions. Judas is invited to the last supper in the full knowledge that he will betray Jesus. Because here at the Eucharist people are not judged on moral or racial or religious terms, but related to as persons. At the table of Jesus, whatever inherent risk there is in worldly terms, here it is rendered redundant and nonsensical. For what we are invited to share in this meal is the coming together in blessing, for the inherent goodness in God’s creation. Here is the place where the Word of God is remembered, and praise and thanksgiving given for God’s Spirit amongst us. So, fifthly, blessings are inclusive and they offer wellness for everyone. They are subversive in our world because here is one feast, a celebration, at which there are no insiders and no outsiders. You actually don’t need a club membership card. And you don’t need to pay any fees. And how subversive is this - especially for the Church? But look what happens of its own accord in this meal with Christ: as a social outsider, having received the inclusive invitation to dine with Jesus, by Jesus himself, what does Zacchaeus then offer to do? ‘Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.’ Luke 19: 8. He turns his whole life around to one of giving to others. He’s not buying into a club membership, but his own sudden recognition of the value of what he is invited to participate in at such a deep level instinctively turns his desires into wanting to share what he has with others. All blessings are particular and individual, but they recognise that the calling out of goodness in one person is in effect the calling for more life and more wellbeing for everyone. Blessings are inherently inclusive, seeking to integrate and gather together, rather than split off. No-one is considered unworthy or insignificant of notice at our Lord’s table because that is the very place where we are all healed. Given this then, that everyone is invited to participate in the life of God, sixthly and finally, blessings affirm our interconnectedness and interdependence. At the heart of Margaret Silf’s latest book, Hidden Wings, is this salutation of the butterfly effect. What I say and do today, what you say and do today, can have bearing on a child growing up in England or Sudan. When a person is blessed before going on a pilgrimage, it can change the way that persons relates to people they encounter. Blessings are subversive because they are relational in nature to a wider community, rather than individualistic. When you bless someone for their journey, or bless a church, or celebrate the Eucharist you are recognising by this action that you and I, or you and this building are linked together in some bigger action of God’s. And all our own stories are linked into a much bigger picture of God’s story of creation. No matter if we were born 2000 years ago and knew Jesus then, or 4 000 years ago and didn’t know him; no matter if we live the life of a hermit or recluse today - we are all a part of God’s story of our planet earth and our time and space in the universe. Indigenous cultures have so much to teach us because they are steeped in this innate wisdom. We may believe that we have been created prima facie as existential, alienated beings. We may feel because of dispossession, suffering or violence that we are split off. But as Desmond Tutu teaches, there is a word in his language: Ubuntu. It means, 'I am because You are.’ You and I, whoever you are and I am in whatever circumstances, right now in this room - you are you because of who I am, and I am myself because of who you are. And this mutuality ripples out into the wider world beyond the edges. This whole reflection could have been about the Beatitudes, and I still wouldn’t have said enough. As a group of statements about being living in the fullness of God, they are outrageous and impossible in worldly terms. But that’s just it, they are about life in the kingdom of God. Benedictine monk and systematic theologian, Luigi Gioia urges us not to understand the Beatitudes so much as a moral code of conduct, but as a portrait of Jesus: his justice, his perfection, his purity, his forgiveness. He writes in Say it To God: In Search of Prayer ‘....only because of and insofar as they are related to him do they relate to us.’ In our humanity we fall vastly short of Christ’s perfection. Perhaps ultimately it’s only via music that the inward signs toward what living with and in blessing as being an alternate way, can truly be discovered. The composer Arvo Pärt has written a piece for the Beatitudes. In his interpretation there are two distinctive traits which really speak here. One is the silence that marks the gap between the first half and the second half of each line. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit…..(pause)……for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ The pause is the silence, the time taken to absorb and bring into effect the power of the second part of the line. And the second trait is the organ music itself. Initially only the voices carry the music and the organ is gradually introduced. Its tone begins like a short growl under the sung words, then departing in silence, only to re-emerge in the next line. And each time the organ sounds, it's own presence is a little more emphatic, a little more insistent. This growl gradually increases in immensity and climaxes at the end of the last line. What we hear here, I believe, is Arvo Pärt drawing our attention to God’s great affirmation of living in ‘markarios.’ This affirmation is born from a deeply erotic, a primal place. By erupting gradually underneath the words and building up and up, the music itself finally explodes open as the surge of Love – of God's very groundedness - strives to turn right around our more worldly assumptions about what the nature of love means. What we think, generally in our day to day transactional interactions to be the case, in fact, in God’s realm is not the case. To live in this way of blessing is not a weakness, but a deep primal strength which can only come out of the very foundations of a God of Love. Makarios like eulogeo, is a call from below to all of us in our world to turn around and open our hearts to the very Giver of life, and begin to draw the wellness of life from this subversive wellspring. This piece was first given by Carol O'Connor at a Margaret Silf Summit in Melbourne: Imagining the Self in a Spiritually Expansive World offered by Kardia Formation,19th May 2018.

Dedicated to the memory of Max Richards. Friend and poet mentor. Narrator: Annie Dillard: ponderer of life, astute observer of nature. Her prose constantly calls us to position and reposition ourselves in response to her ideas and those of other quoted essayists, poets, philosophers, scientists, rabbis, anthropologists……. Statement of fact and interpretative meaning often go hand in hand. Sometimes it feels as if we, the reader, fall through her prose. Sometimes, it’s like journeying through dense bushland. Her voice is bold; she makes plain statements but seems to withdraw just as quickly, to let silence and gaps speak as eloquently as any well-formed phrase spiced with artless aside. She is a writer slippery as an eel who leads the reader down into caverns of ideas and questions: about life, suffering, God, existence. She challenges us and plays with us. But there is a tender quality to her prose, a kindness even in throes of her tearing passions, or barking at God, or sudden unexpected shift of reasoning. She always has us the reader in hand; not tightly, but as invitation, utilising her sharp wit and craft, humour to full effect. A wily weaver of phrases; her writing is soaked with humanity. American Childhood: I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, in a house full of comedians, reading books. Possibly because Father had loaded his boat one day and gone down the Ohio River, I confused leaving with living, and vowed that when I got my freedom I would do both. Narrator: American Childhood is Annie Dillard’s autobiography and here she consciously constructs a portrait of her early life and her growing sense of selfhood in the world. She is the eldest of three girls: Amy, second. Dillard tells us Amy ‘was a looker’ and that Annie had ‘made several attempts to snuff baby Amy in her cradle’. American Childhood: Mother had repeatedly discovered me pouring glasses of water carefully into her face. Narrator: But Molly, the youngest, as a baby was different. American Childhood: I liked everything about her - the strong purity of her cheerfulness, bewilderment, outrage; her big dumb baldness, pointy fingers, little teeth, the works. Narrator: However, it’s adolescence that tells us most about Annie Dillard’s emerging self in the world. American Childhood: I was what they called a live wire. Narrator: Adolescence is her first great awakening. All sorts of dynamic emotions were bubbling up inside her. Anger she describes then as feeling….. American Childhood: ….myself coiled and longing to kill someone or bomb something big….. Narrator: So too, aspects of life and other people became apparent. American Childhood: ……..Sometimes in class I couldn’t stop laughing; things were too funny to be borne. It began then my surprise that no one else saw what was so funny. Narrator: As a teenager Dillard read Rimbaud, the French symbolists, British War Poets, Lucretius, Hardy, Updike, Emerson…… American Childhood: I read with the pure exhilarating greed of sixteen, seventeen year olds; I felt I was exhuming lost continents and plundering their stores. Narrator: She discovered passion. American Childhood: I loved my boyfriend so tenderly, I thought I must transmogrify into vapour. It would take spectroscopic analysis to locate my molecules into thin air. No possibly way of holding him was close enough. Nothing could cure this bad case of gentleness except, perhaps, violence: maybe if he swung me by the legs and split my skull on a tree? Would that ease this insane wish to kiss too much his eyelids outer corners and his temples, as if I could love up his brain. Narrator: During these years, her energy and her questioning broke many social boundaries: she wrote a ‘fierce’ letter to her minister and quit the church; she was suspended from school for smoking cigarettes; she played her father’s snare drum so hard ‘on a particularly piercing rock-n-roll down beat’ that she broke straight through it. Taking up an offer to join a drag race with some boys she hardly knew and in the process breaking both her knees, she was sent to juvenile court - her parents were horrified to read an account of the incident in a newspaper. But it was during this period too, Dillard came to realise that adolescence is a time when although your consciousness is being opened, other unanticipated realities hinder your spirit. American Childhood: For as long as I could remember I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn’t remember how to forget myself….I was a boulder blocking my own path……Must I then lose the world forever that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will? Narrator: Well, the world that she had so loved wasn’t lost. What she illustrates for us in her subsequent literary career is that life is a series of awakenings. To be an ardent lover of life actually involves an ongoing process of questioning, wondering, suffering, knowing the suffering world. The boulder of herself that blocked her own path actually became the very place for her own passionate consciousness to discover new paths. ‘We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught, to wake up’ she says in Total Eclipse. And as her own adolescent consciousness awoke, she began that lifelong recognition that we are all forever bonded to this particular present moment; to our present circumstances. American Childhood: I am or seem to be on a road walking. Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos: Being here is being here on the rocks. Holy the Firm: I seem to be on a road, standing still. Narrator: It’s from trust in this place where she ‘seems to be’ that she ‘seems’ to sense the vibrations below the surface of the planet; vibrations which are in touch with what she calls in Holy the Firm, the Absolute at base. God. A familiar phrase in mystical writings (which here is the context I am most interested in concerning the writings of Annie Dillard) is that if God were to be symbolised as a circle, then God’s centre is nowhere and circumference is everywhere. It’s a phrase that Lawrence Freeman, Benedictine monk and Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation, used in his series of talks ‘Return to the Centre’ at a silent retreat he gave in Italy in 2010. The circumference of my own textual discussion will limit itself to only some of Dillard’s essays and extended reflective writing (not her fiction): Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone to Talk, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, For the Time Being and Holy the Firm, Expedition to the Pole, Seeing, Galapagos, Lenses and Field of Silence. Several of these works appear in the volume titled after the story, Teaching a Stone to Talk, and either in full or edited in The Annie Dillard Reader and her latest publication, Abundance. This is my circumference, but what of a centre in Dillard’s writing? In the first of his retreat papers, Lawrence Freeman explained that the word ‘centre’ in physics means the ‘centre of mass’ which is the mean location of all the mass in the system. Thus, your ‘centre of mass’ is where all the mass measured on the scales in the bathroom is located; a rigid body has a fixed centre. However, because we are in constant change, (like a loose distribution of masses, the solar system or even, for that matter the church) the centre of mass for these kinds of bodies is a point in space. This means in a dynamic, moving body the centre of mass does not have to be identified with a particular thing. So too, outside physics, the centre can have a geographical location and an inward apprehension; it is ‘out there’ in the world and ‘in here’ in your being. The word ‘centre’ itself comes from the Latin word ‘centrum’ referring to the fixed point of the two points of the compass. Behind that is the Greek word, ‘kentron’ meaning a sharp point, the sting of a wasp, related to the Greek word, ‘kentein’ to stitch, related to ‘kent’ to prick something. Thus, the word ‘centre’ has idea of precision, stability, sharpness, fixity in some way and also is dynamic and open and moving. So a centre: 1. fixed, yet moving, and 2. in the world, and in yourself. Dillard is a shape shifter of prose; each of these works seem to move the reader through bundles of images and metaphors, themes constantly bob up to disappear again and emerge pages later, or in other works. Passages seem to cross space and time. The reader remembers impressions, passages out of context or locates them in various forms in different essays over different periods of time. But there’s always some sense, albeit elusive, that something is holding all this together. There is a ‘kentron’ in her body of work. And intuitively for me, this fixed point of the compass lies somewhere outside the text. So where is this centre point of gravity in Dillard’s writing? One hint is that in all these essays and extended reflections Annie Dillard chooses to use the voice of the first person. This first person is a consciously crafted Dillard persona. And when you hear the voice of this persona across her various works you begin to sense this deeper place from where Dillard is speaking. This is why I have decided to present this paper this afternoon in the form of a play or a pageant. To understand a little of that deeper place where Dillard is coming from, it helps to hear this voice of her persona, her carefully crafted ‘I’, across a number of these works. Each character in this pageant is the title of one of her essays or books. In Holy the Firm, Dillard quotes Psalm 24: ‘Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his Holy Place?’ In these two questions I trace a hint of ‘kentron’ pushing into the text. Dillard herself is taking on this task to ascend the holy hill, stand before God, knowing that ‘those who have clean hands and pure hearts’ which the psalmist calls for, is actually really a call for every single one of us, blundering and awkward and impure, to orient ourselves toward this sacred ground. She emphasises: ‘There is no-one but us’. She sees herself to be a traveller toward and a witness of a God who is personally involved in creation and with His people. This is the Christian God, the New Testament God, who is increasingly seen to be for her of infinite depth and breadth, of ultimate mystery. This is the God of the Church, in all its beauty, its flawed notations, the God of all people even in, especially in, our human absurdities. This is the God of Love. And because of that strong, deep apprehension of the action of Love which I hear again and again in her works, I would like (as Narrator) to try and help us in a small way understand the writings of Annie Dillard as those being of a Lover. One of Dillard’s own great loves is the ‘broadax.’ Use of this tool, this large axe with a broad blade, is not just for hewing timber or as a weapon, but can actually inform your determination to become a writer. In Holy the Firm, Dillard puts a question to students in her writing class. Holy the Firm: Which of you want to give your lives and be writers? Narrator: Her question is immediately linked in with her own inward sensations… Holy the Firm: I was trembling from coffee, or cigarettes, or the closeness of faces all around me. Narrator: … and then, with a further bracketed aside, leaving this question still breathlessly hanging, she questions herself: Holy the Firm: (Is this what we live for? I thought; is this the only final beauty: the colour of any skin in any light, and living, human eyes?)’. Narrator: And only then does she give us the students’ response. Holy the Firm: All hands rose to the question. (You, Nick? Will you? Margaret? Randy? Why do I want them to mean it?) And then I try to tell them what the choice must mean: you can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax ….they had no idea what I was saying….they thought I was raving again. It is just as well. Narrator: But in The Writing Life she is quite emphatic with the reader, (after all, we must not think she is ‘raving mad’); she tells us that when you write, you must … The Writing Life: … aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood, aim for the chopping block. Narrator: The ‘broadax’ is a determination to look at your life with full force and without flinching; it is that inner tool which cuts through everything that gets in the way of your art. It operates in relationship with vision. The vision itself… The Writing Life: … is no marvellous thing…it is a chip of the mind, a pleasing intellectual object….It is a vision of the work, not of the world…A writer sees the world, sees nature, sees God, sees life, and goes at it with a broadax of language and vision. All the time knowing the work is not the vision itself….It is not the vision reproduced in time…it is rather a simulacrum and a replacement. It is a golem. You try - you try every time - to reproduce the vision, to let your light so shine before men. But you can only come along with your bushel and hide it. Narrator: Dillard, of course, is a lover of the artist, the word spiller. Although she has written about her drawing pursuits, (generally not very flatteringly), I haven’t yet seen any of her art work published. For her, the vision is best communicated by the broadax of language. That’s where her sense as the artist lies. The Writing Life: …..the sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.…the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace… Narrator: In preparing this piece about Annie Dillard’s work, I too have only the same word stuff with which to respond. I asked myself, how can I respond to such a sophisticated artful mistress of word? Annie Dillard herself poses the question like this: Who will teach me to write? She then answers… The Writing Life: The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because action is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellencies as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you write. Narrator: I am mindful too at her insistence that the writer… The Writing Life : …..give it all now, spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. Narrator: So, in my attempt to give it all, and with the help of my own paltry broadax, (as if this action were easy, a mere swing of a sentence, instead blundering lurches) here – already after seven pages - we go with Annie. Annie Dillard is a lover of fixed points. Often these points are described locally, geographically or by noting the time of day. Whatever awareness we may personally have about a ‘kentron’ in life, we can never control life itself. Her statements are bold, categorical, confident. Words fall as quotable aphorisms or elongated, dense reflections upon the page. Her ideas are often rounded off with a pointed wry tone. Holy the Firm: We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep in time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of light uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for home. Narrator: Her own prose is most often not driven by reason or narrative sequence, but fixed moments propelled with personal insight in urgent need of utterance, or questions of cosmological meaning. Chronos time can quickly shift into kairos. Tenses become blurred. For her concern is always…. Holy the Firm: Not events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turnings. Narrator: Phrases themselves seem to wriggle and thrash under the pin of her sharp pen. She wrestles to pin down time itself. Holy the Firm: If days are gods, then gods are dead, and artists pyrotechnic fools. Time is a hurdy-gurdy, a lampoon, and death’s a bawd. We’re beheaded by the nick of time. We’re logrolling on a falling world, on time released from meaning and rolling loose, like one of Atlanta’s golden apples, a bauble flung and forgotten, lapsed, and the gods on the lam. Narrator: We sense the reader could enter almost any piece of her writing at any paragraph on any page and move outwards in their reading of the text from here. In other words, the narrative as such isn’t simply a linear read - through from page 1 to 50. This is not because there is no narrative structure. The work still generally makes much more sense when you read it from beginning to end. However, the poetic prose is often jammed packed with stories, quotes, a bizarre range of seeming distractions, and a flowing, a stream of ideas settling into the echoing themes. Each paragraph possesses its own sharp message. Each paragraph stings like a wasp. But her writing also opens itself like the petals of a flower whose root system lies unuttered below the text; palpitating and silent, but continually urging articulation, providing life force for the work. It is as if another presence is out to insist itself into her work. A presence that is organic, dynamic. Towards the beginning of Holy the Firm Dillard tells us…. Holy the Firm: Nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity chips time. Narrator: Well, the ‘little violence’, the ‘corner where eternity chips time’, I can only surmise is actually the fixed point of the tragedy that happens to young Julie Norwich (resonances of her name to the medieval mystic, I’m sure not unintentional). Her face is burnt off when the airplane her father is flying crashes. Dillard hears the crash happen. In this work Dillard makes it her business to question the meaning of horrific suffering. Is Dillard here making her own point that language is totally ineffective when depicting such a horror? Is she implying that the implications of such an event can never be realised only via language? For the work, remember, is not the vision, but the golem. Any understanding to be had from the nature of such a tragedy a person has to go deeper; a person has to connect with something that connects with something that touches, however lightly or minimally, what Dillard names as Holy the Firm, the Absolute. Fixed points. Moving centres. Dillard is also a lover of edges. Of geographical outposts. The Arctic, the Galapagos. Of uncharted inner landscapes. North Puget Sound where she has lived is characterized by saltwater bays and islands carved out by prehistoric glaciers. She walks the edges of these places. The environment you choose to write in also must have that sense of outpost. It must be free from distraction of the world. You must have ‘a room with no view.’ It can be anywhere: a carrel room at night in a University Library in California, a prefabricated pine toolshed cum writing room on Cape Cod. But it must have that remote edge quality. Inner revelation only happens on the border of boundaries. In ‘a room with no view’ the outer world is taken in and reshaped more clearly. It’s the place where an artist sees more deeply. Holy the Firm: The room I live is plain as a skull; a firm setting for windows. Narrator: Until Dillard actually names her environment, whether it’s Galapagos or Cape Cod or Puget Sound, one is never quite sure exactly where she is. Sometimes it feels like she could be in any of these places. Ultimately, this edge is illusive. As consciousness begins to awaken, places become hazy. But as consciousness clears, insight is realised, geography gains clarity. In Holy the Firm Dillard refers many times to a map of islands. She struggles to remember the name of each island. As the essay unfolds and with it the articulation of her own expanding consciousness, her own coming to terms with suffering and its meaning in the world, more and more of these islands start being seen, until she says towards the end….. Holy the Firm: …..there are thousands of new islands today, unchartered. They are salt stones on fire and dimming. Narrator: The more we understand, the wider the territory extends, and we are given new places to move on into. Dillard is a lover of imagery and ideas; she piles one idea on top of another. Her writing can haunt the reader. Life on the Rocks - Galapagos: I’m dealing in imagery, working toward a picture. Narrator: Many and various word pictures ripple through her texts. The image of ‘fire’ recurs through Holy the Firm. It burns off Julie Norwich’s face in the plane accident. Gut wrenching and appalling as this mental picture is, the fire has other meanings for Dillard. It is fire that bursts open the moth’s head in the flame of a candle so its body becomes a second wick; it is fire that is remembered as having burned in Rimbaud’s head. Holy the Firm: What can any artist set on fire but his world? Narrator: Rimbaud’s own …. Holy the Firm: …..face is a flame like a seraph’s, lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see. Narrator: The tail of Dillard’s cat Small, catches fire so she has to quickly rub it out before Small notices. Fire, is a force of violence and a purifier of spirit, an artistic inspiration and prayerful supplication. Another image in Holy the Firm is god or gods, spelt with a small ‘g’. These are pagan gods who bring meaning and contentment, or rage and distraction. They bring moods and energy, their own climate into the world. They are like human impulses, our reactions to what is happening around us, which we both honour and are at the mercy of. Holy the Firm: Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. Narrator: Dillard ‘wakes in a god’; at breakfast the cat Small brings in a dead wren to her, presumably he has caught; and then later brings in a little ‘scorched’ god….. Holy the Firm: … save for his wings he is a perfect, very small man. Narrator: Dillard rescues this scorched god and he companions her that morning. He…. Holy the Firm: …..rides barefoot on my shoulder, or astride it, or tugging or swinging on loops of my hair. Narrator: There are many other references to these daily domestic gods appearing in Holy the Firm….. Holy the Firm: The god of today is rampant and drenched…..The god of today is a boy, pagan and fernfoot…The god of today is a child, a baby new and filling the house, remarkably here in the flesh….That day was a god too…..the god of today is a glacier…a delinquent, a barn-burner…. Narrator: But when Dillard finally spells God with a capital ‘G’ that’s when we know she’s really serious; this is the one true God. This is the Holy the Firm God. The biblical God. The God with whom we are accorded to have relationship. The God we reach out to in prayer. Holy the Firm: …a nun lives in the fires of the spirit…thoughtful and tough in the mind… Narrator: Julie Norwich is remembered before the accident to have dressed Dillard’s cat Small so it unintentionally looked like a nun. Towards the end of the work Dillard thinks Julie Norwich ‘might as well be a nun.’ But in the final sentence of the work, it’s Dillard who takes ownership of this metaphor and by doing so blesses her young friend. Holy the Firm: Julie Norwich; I know. Surgeons will fix your face. This will all be a dream, an anecdote, something to tell your husband one night: I was burned….So live. I’ll be the nun for you. I am now. Narrator: We, the reader, share the metaphor. We too, somehow finally become the nun, for Julie, for Annie. As the nun image becomes transferred from character to author, it beckons to us. We are all taken into this relationship with this ultimate capital ‘G’ God. It’s as if Dillard is saying, this is how it is for me, and now asking, how is it for you? Dillard doesn’t explain. It’s left to us in what’s unsaid to make the connections. Dillard is a lover of silence. And hers is a profound love, I think, because she knows the truth of it. Once when living at a place called ‘the farm’ in Puget Sound, she saw Silence: … silence heaped on the fields like trays. Narrator: It was a lonely time in her life, although at the time she didn’t know it. She saw these fields bear the silence. Silence: The silence spread over them, giant in size. Narrator: It revealed to her something of the loneliness in God. Silence: I do not think I want to ever see such a sight again……..the silence bashed me broadside from the heavens above me like yard goods…….the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. Narrator: Silence for her is both a noun and a verb; something tangible, and something dynamic. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chinese say that we live in the world of ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing. The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters. It is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. Narrator: Silence is inherent in teaching a stone to talk. We can teach it to talk only by understanding what it tells us about ourselves. We want the stone to talk, but are we ready to hear it? Are we ready to hear truth within ourselves? Dillard is a lover of nature, of observing nature, and observing nature particularly in action. Teaching a Stone to Talk: We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need….That is why I take walks, to keep an eye on things. And that is why I went to the Galapagos islands. Seeing: It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Narrator: Annie Dillard is a watcher in the world. Always trying to see afresh, more clearly. In the Writing Life she plays with a bird bone until she can really begin to see it. She is aware that sometimes we don’t see straight; seeing properly takes time. In order to see we may need time, and even absence can help. Like everyone else who visited the Galapagos she tells us that she too at first ‘specialised’ in the enjoyment of watching the playful joyful life of sea lions. But it was only after a period of absence and return to the island that she began to really see the ‘palo santo tree’, thin pale wispy. Now she would no longer like to ‘come back’ as a sea lion but a palo santo tree…… Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos: …..on the weather side of an island, so that I could be, myself, a perfect witness, and look, mute, and wave my arms. Narrator: Seeing is an act that is both fixed and moving, destabilising. Lenses: ….. through binoculars I followed the swans, swinging where they flew. All their feathers were white; their eyes were black. Their wingspan was six feet; they were bigger than I was. They flew in unison, on behind the other….As I rotated on my heels to keep the black frame of the lenses around them, I lost all sense of space. If I lowered the binoculars I was always amazed to learn in which direction I faced - dazed, the way you emerge awed from a movie and try to reconstruct bit by bit, a real world, in order to discover where in it you might have parked the car. Narrator: And watching the natural world can be problematic. Sometimes it can lead us to go badly off centre and lose our bearings. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: This looking business is risky……..Once I stood on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars the great autumn hawk migration below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own. I was used to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing on humped rocks while looking through them. I staggered. Everything advanced and receded by turns; the world was full of unexplained foreshortenings and depths. A distant huge tan object, a hawk the size of an elephant, turned out to be the browned bough of a nearby loblolly pine…I reel in confusion. I don’t understand what I see. Narrator: There are also things in the world that we would like to see but we can’t with the naked eye. They are too small. There are the minutiae of ‘aerial detritus’, abundance that flies in the air. For the Time Being: A surprising portion of it is spider legs, and bits thereof. Spider legs are flimsy……because they are hollow, they lack muscles; compressed air moves them. Consequently the snap off easily and blow about. Narrator: The process of evolution itself at this minutiae level is a fascination for her. Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos: Now we see the embellishments of random chromosomal mutations selected by natural selection and preserved by geographically isolate gene pools as fait accompli… Narrator: As a child Dillard spent periods of time gazing at life under her childhood microscope. Having replaced the 5-watt bulb with a 75-watt one, she spent evenings in her basement laboratory pouring over her pond water amoebae and rotifers on under glass slides. Lenses: I dropped (the pond water creatures) on a slide, floated a cover slip over them, and laid the slide on the microscope’s stage, which the seventy five watt bulb had heated like a grill. At once the drop of pond water started to evaporate. Its edges shrank. The creatures swam among algae in a diminishing pool. I liked this part. The heat worked form as a centrifuge, to concentrate the biomass. I had about five minutes to watch the members of a very dense population, excited by the heat, go about their business until - as I fancied sadly - they all caught on to their situation and started making out their wills. It was, then, not lonely watching the much-vaunted wonders in a drop of pond water; I was also, with mingled sadism and sympathy, setting up a limitless series of apocalypses. I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out. Over and over again, the last trump sounded, the final scroll unrolled, and the known world drained, dried and vanished. When all the creatures lay motionless, boiled and fried in the positions they had when the last of their water dried completely, I washed the slide in the sink and started over with a fresh drop. How I loved that deep, wet world where the coloured algae waved in the water and the rotifers swam. Narrator: The minute world of the amoebae and rotifers is contexualised on the grandest scale possible: the apocalypse at the end of the world. Even at this level, existence has serious meaning. But the prose is hilarious too. Dillard is a lover of humour and irony, gentle self-mockery. It is never far off. Her gaze is dead straight, blunt as a broadax, and also amused at the imperfections in human actions, a wry humour, but never cynical nor derisory. There are no cheap shots. Here, with the wisdom of years and moral understanding, she parodies her childhood self as a God staging ‘hundreds of ends-of-the-world’ scenes of life under microscopic observation. But with her humour there is also underlying seriousness. We must own and take responsibility at some point in our lives for the havoc we can wreak upon creation. It’s one of many lessons in teaching a stone to talk. Teaching a Stone to Talk: It is difficult to undo our own damage….it is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind…. Narrator: Like Teilhard de Chardin in For the Time Being, Dillard is a lover of life lived as a journey that is both purposeful and paradoxical. Life on the Rocks: The Galapogos: We are strangers and sojourners, soft dots on the rocks. Sojourner: ….the planet itself is a sojourn in airless space. Narrator: The essay For the Time Being is an extended reflection on the journeying of the Jesuit philosopher and French palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It is subsequently edited and included in the book Abundance. Teilhard de Chardin, in exile from the Church from the early 1920s, banned from teaching and publishing because of his Darwinian interests but permitted to undertake scientific research and travel, he nonetheless remained faithful to his Jesuit vows. Intermixed with questions and observations concerning ontological meaning and existence, Dillard describes his journey in 1923 through the plateau, the Ordos, of the Inner Mongolian Desert and sketches the rest of his life til his death in 1955. His travels and writings become the vehicle for her own internalised reflections. There’s a double vision happening here. For Teilhard de Chardin, as for Annie Dillard, life retains this sense of life as change and reformation, a sojourn in mystery. For the Time Being: I’m beginning to think that I shall always be like this and that death will find me a still a wanderer. Narrator: Dillard is a lover of science, of archaeology; she questions how things work and where they come from. Uncovering ancient ruins is like unearthing buried wisdom. She writes with relish about Teilhard de Chardin’s explorations. For the Time Being: They dug through sixty four feet of sand before they revealed an ancient hearth where Paleolithic people cooked… Narrator: The scientific composition of and reasons for sand, clouds, landscape fascinates her, fills her with more questions. For the Time Being: Everything sifts over things as dirt or dust…..Why is there sand in deserts? Where does it come from? Why is there sand on beaches? Narrator: Her answers can be lengthy and scientific; like de Chardin’s mixed with philosophical insight. For the Time Being: Sand bangs about in deserts and wears down their angles. Kuenen went so far as to determine how much desert the world “needs” - 2 X 10 square kilometres, in order….to keep the world average roundness constant (to offset the new, sharp-cornered sand added each year)…We live surrounded by ideas and objects infinitely more ancient than we imagine…and yet at the same time everything is in motion. Narrator: Dillard is a lover of distilled essence. Of the journey toward the sublime. For her, like Teilhard de Chardin…. For the Time Being: Purity does not live in a separation from the universe…but in deeper penetration of it. Narrator: Deeper penetration of the universe involves journeying toward some unnameable experience of the sublime or the Absolute. She describes it in An Expedition to the Pole as a journey toward an… An Expedition to the Pole: …….imaginary point on the Arctic Ocean farthest from land in any direction…… or named in metaphysics, The Absolute……...that point of spirit farthest from every accessible point in all directions. Like the others, it is a Pole of the Most Trouble. It is also - I take this as given - the pole of great price. Narrator: In this journey we have the capacity to act absurd and ridiculous. Her essay An Expedition to the Pole once more employs this double vision of two parallel narratives working together. As she narrates 19th century polar expeditions, she weaves through it a description of her attending Mass in a Catholic Church during Advent. Both activities, the polar expedition and the Catholic Mass, involve pursuit of the sublime; and both are littered with the consequences of absurd human flaws. Going to Mass on one particular morning, Dillard tells us that she has now….. An Expedition to the Pole: …..joined the circus as a dancing bear…we mince around the rings on our two feet……Today we were restless; we kept dropping onto our forepaws. No one, least of all the organist, could find the opening hymn. Then no one knew it. Then no one could sing it anyway. There was no sermon, only announcements. Narrator: In both narratives the closer the Absolute is thought to be, the more likely there is to be ridiculous human action. Two doomed ships, under the command of Sir John Franklin, left London in 1845 seeking the North West Passage, fitted out with voluminous libraries, and ill-equipped sailors. Twenty years later search parties found bodies scattered over the ice. Beside many of the bodies were silver cut initialled officer cutlery; beside one body ‘a piece of the very backgammon board Lady Jane had given her husband (the captain) as a parting gift’. The Mass Dillard attends builds up to ‘the solemn saying of those few hushed phrases known as the Sanctus’. And just as the congregation is ‘about to utter the word of the Sanctus, the lead singer’ from the band called Wildflowers ‘burst onstage from the wings…..his enthusiastic strides, pumping his guitar’s neck up and down….’ Dillard ponders….. An Expedition to the Pole: Must I join this song? May I keep only my silver? My backgammon board, I agree, is a frivolity. I relinquish it. I will leave it right here on the ice. But my silver? My family crest? One knife, one fork, one spoon, to carry beneath the glance of heaven and back? I have lugged it around for years; I am, I say, superlatively strong. Don’t laugh. I am superlatively strong! Don’t laugh; you’ll make me laugh. The answer is no. We are singing the Sanctus it seems, and they are passing the plate. I would rather, I think, undergo the famous dark night of the soul than encounter in church the dread hootenanny - but these purely personal preferences are of no account and maladaptive to boot. They are passing the plate and I toss in my schooling; I toss in my rank. I, the Royal Navy, my erroneous and incomplete charts, my pious refusal to eat sled dogs, my watch, my keys and my shoes. I was looking for bigger game, not little moral lessons - but who can argue with conditions?’ “Heaven and earth, earth, earth, earth’ we sing. The withdrawn boy turns his head toward a man in front of me, who must be his father. Unaccountably, the enormous teenaged soprano catches my eye, exultant. A low shudder of shock crosses our floe. We have split from the pack; we have crossed the Arctic Circle, and the current has us. Narrator: But within this context, for all its absurdity, God is there, intensely within our human dimensions. We are not abandoned, but there with Christ… An Expedition to the Pole: Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes the disciples’ feet, handles their very toes, and repeats it is alright - believe it or not - to be people. Who can believe it? Narrator: This same God too, does not smash her to smithereens when she really lets rip at Him in Holy the Firm. Taking on the suffering of Julie Norwich she broadens this to the suffering of the world. Like Job, she questions God in passionate rage. Holy the Firm: Of faith I have nothing, only of truth; that this one God is a brute and a traitor, abandoning us to time, to necessity and the engines of matters unhinged. This is no leap, this is evidence of things seen; one Julie, one sorrow, one sensation bewildering the heart, and enraging the mind, and causing me to look at the world stuff appalled, at the blithering rock of trees in a random wind……Faith would be…that God has any wilful connection with time whatsoever, and with us. For I know it as given that God is good……the question is then whether God touches anything. Is anything firm or is time on the loose? …how do we know, how could we know that the real is there..? Narrator: And it’s only after all this spiritual struggle, in the first line of the section appropriately titled Day 3 (In The Annie Dillard Reader), that she shifts our thinking sideways by opening with….. Holy the Firm: I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasion, and leaves his creations’ dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were; God kann nicht anders. This process is time is history; in space, at such shocking random, it is mystery. Narrator: And this, I believe, is where all her writing is coming from: worship of God. God is the mass; God is the centre. In this worship of God is the recognition of mystery. The processes of life itself can take us to this place of worship. Whatever God’s relationship with creation, whatever the suffering, God still ‘has a stake guaranteed in all the world.’ For without God’s light the world is… Holy the Firm: ….. ‘wasteland and chaos’ just as ‘a life without sacrifice is an abomination’. Narrator: Annie Dillard is a lover of God. A God who is committed to the particular and local, whose unending energy flows through His creation. For all the uncomfortable struggles and questions about suffering, meaning, life and existence, for all that seems ludicrous, at the end of An Expedition to the Pole, the depth of her devotion to God erupts into the text. Like the biblical Miriam, after the liberation of the Exodus, Dillard in the Catholic Mass also belts out on her tambourine. She’s found that space inside herself where she can glimpse that transparency of self which she had as a child, yet still value that boulder which blocks her path and upon which she continues to hone her vision. She so beautifully captures here that sense of a vibrant moving inner centre; and I read her here as an ecstatic, a whirling dervish: An Expedition to the Pole: In my hand I discover a tambourine. Far ahead, out on the brittle horizon, I see tabular bergs and floebergs and dark cracks in the water between them. Low overhead on the underside of the thickening cloud cover are dark colorless stripes reflecting pools of open water in the distance. I am banging on the tambourine, and singing whatever the piano player plays; now it’s “On Top of Old Smokey.” I am banging the tambourine and belting the songs so loudly that people are edging away. But how can any of us tone it down? For we are nearing the Pole. Dramatis Personae: Narrator An American Childhood Holy the Firm Life on the Rocks The Writing Life Silence Teaching a Stone to Talk Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos Seeing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Sojourner For the Time Being An Expedition to the North Pole #AnnieDillard #Value #Faith #Silence #Writing #God #pagan #HolytheFirm #PilgrimatTinkerCreek

And I will continue along this wide grain field I was called in life to be a shearer To reap with my hasty hands The harvest of earthly hearts. (From the Poems of Mother Maria, ‘The Russian Plain: poems, mystery-plays, prose, and autobiographical fiction, letters.’ Edited by A.N. Shustov. Translated by Natalie Ermolaev. St. Petersburg, Iskusstvo, 2001) In the last two weeks our Victorian State Government’s Stage 4 response to the pandemic here in Melbourne has made the lives of many us feel smaller. Our actions now are more circumscribed, our geographical movement restricted. The familiar street terrain now feels like our only terrain. At the same time, the digital world has expanded, screens and social media thread us in to a wider context: with friends, family, news about the spread or control of the pandemic. So our vision shifts between the small, circumscribed physical, and the expansive view presented to us on screen. More intensely now do we experience that gap between the minutiae of the everyday we touch, and the far abroad we cannot reach. In the Australian Anglican cycle of Prayer on Friday 14th August, we remember 20th century saints and martyrs, and it’s Maria Skobtsova, or Mother Maria, I am moved to say a few words about here. Listening recently to her life story in a Youtube talk given by Rowan Williams in 2018, I remembered years ago we sold in St Peter’s Bookroom a children’s book about the story of a radical Russian nun living in Paris during the occupation. In 1942 when the Nazis rounded up thousands of Jews she managed to enter the Winter Sports Stadium where they were being held before deportation to the camps, and brought them food, and with the help of garbage collectors, smuggled out many children in garbage bins. She also, together with her chaplain Fr Dimitri, forged baptism certificates for Jews in order to help them flee the country. But I’m sure that fact was in this book. Mother Maria was born Russian Orthodox into a wealthy aristocratic family in Latvia in 1891. She died on Good Friday, March 30th, 1945. We understand that she voluntarily took the place of another woman who was panic stricken in line for the crematorium at Ravensbrück. When Mother Maria was first taken there she found 16,000 other inmates stuffed into living quarters that should have only accommodated four thousand. So, what’s the story here between her birth and her death? During her life she very much came to live with that sense of the cross of Christ being, she said, both horizontal and vertical; horizontal in that we live in chronological time and vertical because our vision can be taken up to glimpse the eternal. There are three points here I would like to draw out from Mother Maria’s life. She was a woman, who lived increasingly in a world that for her became more circumscribed and limited, but despite the ongoing loss and intense suffering she both witnessed and personally experienced herself as a refugee and especially with the loss of her three children, she only increased in that sense of the vertical love of God streaming into the world, seeking out, embracing the lost, the lonely and welcoming them especially into God’s household.  Firstly, Mother Maria increasingly dedicated her life to working with the poor and marginalised; secondly, she emphasised that the way to do this was to see each person as a ‘fellow wayfarer in Christ,’ with that sense of what Russian Orthodoxy terms sobornost, conciliarity, catholicity and; thirdly, in this social work and mutuality of relationship, turning to God is central. The impressions of poverty Mother Maria (then Lisveta) witnessed when she was a young woman with her mother in St Petersburg never left her. Much later in Paris, after one broken marriage, and another that was floundering, she actively sought to bring aid to the poor and dispossessed, who were initially the Russian refugees fleeing into Paris and later in the 1930s the Jews, fleeing from Germany and Eastern Europe. Eventually she opened two hostels and her own rented house became a convent, with a small chapel. She slept in a tiny room beneath the stairs near the kitchen. These places of refuge became overflowing and cramped with people living there like herself, cast upon the world with no support. Early each morning she would traverse the Paris markets, begging for leftover vegetables, fish and bones to make soup. In the evenings she often visited those in mental institutions in Paris. She met there people in trauma, suffering shock or depression or who simply couldn’t speak the language. She wrote poetry, saying: I hear their intermittent laughter-tears and their demented speech. Though overwhelmed by bitter grief I want to give my life for each. And this takes me straight to the heart of my second point: sobornost. She wrote: ’I think the fullest understanding of Christ’s giving himself to the world, creating the one Body of Christ….is contained in the Orthodox idea of sobornost … in communing with the world in the person of each individual … we commune with God.’ Sobornost is that personal experience of being physically present, prepared to be vulnerable to another person, and when it comes to welfare, not simply being a giver of handouts.  Sobornost is when a group of people come together as a communal organisation, not a mechanical organisation.  There are stories of Mother Maria sitting up late into the night listening to people’s problems and trauma. ‘It is not enough to give’ she said, ‘we must have a heart that gives.’ Hers was a theology of community based on mutuality and interdependence. She wrote: ‘No one is to become for us a routine cipher whose role is to swell statistical tables’ There was nothing soft here either; the mutuality was based on adulthood and integrity. She was a woman who believed that in ‘communing with the world in the person of each individual we commune with God.’ For her ‘each person is the very icon of God incarnate in the world.’  An avowed atheist at the age of 14, it was much later that the Theotokos, the Russian icon of Mary, Mother of God, as both suffering human at the foot of the cross but also Queen of Heaven, brought her back to her faith. But even as a nun she remained unconventional, spending more time arguing politics, drinking and smoking well into the night rather than conducting liturgy or being contemplative. She became God-motherly. Fr. Lev Gillet recalls her once saying, after coming back from trying to encourage people homeless in the Paris slums to come back to her hostel: “I would like to swaddle them and rock them to sleep.” Like ours, Mother Maria’s life became circumscribed and limited. But unlike ours, the restrictions imposed upon her were for the wrong reasons - the respect for personhood and culture was denigrated and sought to be annihilated; for us, it’s so that the health and wellbeing for each and every person can be protected in community. Her life has become a testament that however small our terrain becomes, we have the innate capacity to draw on the cross and the compassion in God to seek out and serve those who are now feeling marginalised and in most need at this time, and stand with them as ‘fellow wayfarers in Christ.’ I am your message. Like a torch toss me into the night. So that everyone will see, suddenly know What it is that you want from humanity And what sort of servants you send out to gather the harvest. (From ‘Modernism, Motherhood and Mariology: The Poetry and Theology of Elisaveta Skobtsova’, by Natalie Ermolaev, Columbia University Dissertation, 2010 p 175.)

5th Bunyip Lecture Delivered at St Thomas' Bunyip A certain philosopher questioned the Holy Antony: “How,” he said, “do you content yourself, Father, who is denied the comfort of books?” He answered, “My book, philosopher, is the nature of created things, and as often as I have a mind to read the words of God, it is at my hand.” Sayings of the Desert Fathers Book XXI Today marks the beginning of Advent. Many recent spiritual writers when reflecting on this season, offer reflections on the theme of waiting: waiting for the Word made flesh, for the Word to be born, for the coming of the Christ child. (Jane Williams / Malcolm Guite). The call to know ‘waiting’ is a very helpful tool into living these few weeks before Christmas. To consciously experience waiting steers our preoccupations away from the fast paced world of glitz and consumerism, manic busyness; it encourages us to align with something bigger, something which stills us, attunes us to the meaning of Advent. In the Church cycle, we’re now entering the Year of Luke, and a few Saturdays ago, Melbourne theologian Dorothy Lee reminded us that praise is a keynote here; Luke’s is a ‘Gospel of messianic joy.’ Luke’s emphasis is universal salvation; it is laden with practical ethics and causes us reflection on moral living. One way we’ve habitually come to express praise is through gift giving. In these few weeks of Advent many of us become preoccupied with ‘presents.’ What gift am I going to give someone - my husband, my daughter, family members on Christmas Day? Customers come into the Bookroom and purchase gifts, and Christmas cards, some look for a Kris Kringle gift under $10- for work breakups. Identifying persons who don’t receive gifts, the homeless, the marginalised, is another important part of our giving at Christmas. On Christmas Eve at the 6pm St Peter’s Eastern Hill Children’s service, the church is full. There’s tons of children I’ve never seen before, except maybe last Christmas Eve. The late service is also packed with people who come annually to the parish church for that special Christmasy feel: the music and mass, for connection with the ‘real meaning of Christmas.’ Then, after a brief rest, it’s once more off into the busy Christmas Day activities - travelling between different families for dinners and present giving at several different households. The meaning of the gift giving is briefly glimpsed, perhaps idealised, then relinquished in the active festivities of the day. So what does gift giving mean? As Christians we believe that the real gift on Christmas Day is the birth of Jesus Christ, but what is it that we are being given? And how do we live in response to this gift? “My book, philosopher, is the nature of created things, and as often as I have a mind to read the words of God, it is at my hand.” For Holy Anthony, ‘the nature of all created things’ are gifted to us from God, and to know God is to live in response to this. We are invited to read the ‘words of God’ in our present lives. And, as another Early Church Father, Gregory of Nyssa tells us, we are free to be fully ourselves as we live in response to the gift of God’s love, because God ‘never enforces anything contrary to its nature.’ (see Celebrating the Seasons, p492). God, gives us capacity to reason, to discern, to imagine, to be living the mystery we call ‘being human.’ God is a life affirming source who offers us a freedom which is wholly non-competitive. In this talk this afternoon I would like to ponder a little, three of the many gifts given to us in the birth of Christ Jesus. And they are: the gift of relationship, the gift of memory, and the gift of language. I began as volunteer in St Peter’s Bookroom in 1992. In 1998 I had the privilege of being invited to manage the shop. In these last 20 years of ministry at St Peter’s, the volunteers and I have encountered a great diversity and colourful variety of customers. Customers sometimes offer more to us than we seem to give to them. Especially the ones who have us feel uncomfortable. 3 customers: There’s Peter, who I suspect now lives in a van, has been an irregular customer and parishioner over a long period. Life has been very challenging for him in the last 5 years as far as I can glean - close family members have died and he is increasingly alone. He comes sporadically, four times this year. During the Book Fair in September he purchased over $100 worth of books, which is not unusual for him. But he told me that he can’t transport them. I wonder if he can’t house them anymore. They still sit on top of some cupboards in the church hall where I put them at the end of the Fair. He came in to the shop two weeks ago but hovered only near the front door; I called out hello Peter, he waved but left within a few minutes. The books remain on top of the cupboards. Meanwhile, there’s also James who purchases armloads of carefully chosen books every Friday from the .50cent table. Sometimes he also asks me to hold on to them for him because there’s too many for him to take away at one time. I try to be patient, but I’m often not, because once more I’m having to find room to house books I’m trying to move on. James tells me that he builds tables with the books, and some stools to sit on in his flat. A volunteer in the shop wonders if he is selling them on. And then there’s John. Or was John. About 5 years ago, this customer with a cultured English accent, but a quick violent temper, came regularly over a period of short time. He once purchased over $60 worth of books from the second-hand section. He talked to me about the authors of the books he was choosing - he clearly knew the works. Although he had some money, John was homeless. It was winter. His clothes were dirty, he smelled, and his feet were itching and swollen red with chilblains he complained as he took his shoes and socks off to rub them. His purchased load of books was bundled into a shopping trolley. Of course, I’ve changed the names of these three customers. I’ve given them here the names of 3 of the disciples. This is because as I was writing this talk, I reflected on how they remind me about something to do with being a disciple of Jesus Christ. If we believe that to be a disciple means a vocation and a calling from God, and that the body of Christ really does include everybody, then Peter, James and John confront me. Here are three customers who make me feel uncomfortable because they remind me of an uncomfortable truth about myself. Their desire to purchase so many Christian books in one go despite not be able to house them, transport them, or properly read them, reveals to me the face of my own need. I see in their actions my own susceptibility to becoming terribly stuck at some point in my own quest for the Word made flesh. The Word when acquired only as the bounded black letters contained in the pages of a book, is a very poor substitute for the living relationship they hunger for. Peter, James and John reveal to me my own need for the gift of relationship. Spiritual and religious books are never an end in themselves - they only ever point the way towards. They point the way toward the ‘Word made flesh’, it’s up to the reader to live from the meaning discovered in the book with courage, with a willingness to risk embodying the Word in themselves. Good religious and spiritual writers, and booksellers, know this truth about their books. When we are born, we are born into relationship. The primary relationship we are born into is with God. Our first human relationship is with the person or persons who are our primary care givers. Ideally they are figures of love. To grow and flourish through childhood we need the other - the one who loves us. The network extends outwards into community, between cultures. ‘We go to heaven in one another’s pockets,’ is a phrase quoted by Rowan Williams. A book I have found resonance with recently is Outspoken by Rod Bower, the Anglican priest from Gosford whose post on social media, and on the sign board outside his church in 2013: Some people are gay. Get over it. Love God. caused an overwhelmingly mixed response. Until then he had a Facebook following of 150, but this post came to be viewed over 70 million times, and had1,000s of shares. With his wife Kerry, he’s gone to post many other social justice statements: Islamophobia, we must be better than this; Boat number ‘ZEB037’ is no name for a child. His posts have come at a cost, with death threats and hate mail, and at times the protection of the police with a personal body guard. But it is another story of Rod Bower’s that captured my attention in contemplating the challenge of living relationally. In 2001, as Archdeacon of the Central Coast, he was working long hours and felt his ‘career was definitely on its way.’ One night he received a call from the Assistant Bishop: he was to meet with senior staff, 9am the next day at Bishopscourt. It transpired that the Registrar of the Diocese who was responsible for finances, had stolen a large sum of money. ‘This man had been my friend and colleague for 20 years, best man at our wedding. I really did not know how to respond,’ he writes. (p109). But he did respond. When at Diocesan Council the following week the Bishop instructed no-one on the council to have anything more to do with the Registrar, and if they thought they would they must leave the meeting: Rod Bower, in a state of terrible inner conflict and turmoil, left the meeting. He writes, ‘I knew if I walked out of the meeting it would the the end of my career, but what was the point of being a priest if I couldn’t well, actually be a priest?’ (p109). This was an action which led to a period of great anxiety and depression, in which he confesses without his wife and family he felt he would have suicided. Loving God; being in relationship; living the Word made Flesh, can be really hard. But, as well as one’s closest friends and family, the gift of memory can also help us here. Initially it was the liturgy of the Mass that I sought out and needed most when I first started attending St Peter’s in the late 1980s. Affirmation from and creative connection with each vicar has also been vital for my spiritual growth. But, each time I reflect back upon my time in this parish, I seem to remember the parish and parishioners a little differently. In my first 15-20 years I found St Peter’s comprised many cliques; it seemed like one had to first find a club in order to then ‘belong’ to the parish. I felt an outsider to all these little guilds, some of which had strong fortresses and seemed to have been set up and capably operated since the very foundation of the church in 1846. When I first started as a volunteer the Bookroom was located in a little corridor leading into what was then called the Guild Room. It was very small and had an ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ feel about it to me. It needed volunteers to stay open during the week. One advantage in the reduction in numbers of parishioners over the last 30 years is that the walls of these small clubs have necessarily loosened. Guilds have to have members. Their foundation of straw is only revealed when they dissolve; then we see and freshly re-understand what it means to have our foundation on Christ. But even then, living in any community is challenging. This is because being human is to be a flawed mystery, and in coming together we fail, I fail, so often to be whom I can be best. And it’s only after being at St Peters now for just on 30 years that I can look back and recognise this a little better. During my early years at St Peter’s there was so much I couldn’t see, being preoccupied with the longing to belong. But once I began to understand that I belong really only in and with God, I have begun to re-see the nature of community. We take community with us wherever go because we take with us our capacity for relationship in God. Letting go and re-seeing, re-membering, means the ability to move on, to grow, to be free. And freedom in God means in 10 years time I may see and understand the St Peter’s community differently again. So the gift of memory always happens from the place in which we stand in the present moment. It’s meaning derives from this relationship we have in God. Writers like Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations from 1951-57, and Miroslav Volf, contemporary Croatian theologian, have taught me: go to the hard places, especially in your relationship with God, stand there and see what you can see. Hammarskjold’s private journal Markings, reveals a sensitive, deeply reflective, spiritually attuned man whose spiritual quest was mirrored by his action of seeking to build bridges between tense nations during the Cold War. For Miroslav Volf it’s important to remember the past rightly. Christ’s Passion and resurrection needs to inform how we engage in the action of remembering. Both these men know the importance of living theology. Both, like Rod Bower, passionate regarding issues of social justice in the world; justice through reconciliation, through ‘embrace.’ Remember God’s love in all that you do. When I first started purchasing books from the Bookroom my favourite spiritual authors, who have withstood the test of time, include Esther de Waal, Gerard Hughes, John O’Donohue. Over time, new authors came into my landscape - you’ll never hear a talk of mine without mentioning Rowan Williams. Celtic prayer writer, David Adam has been until recently stage left, his writing and prayers have influenced me much more this year. The works of Joan Chittister I have read a lot. There are writers whose books spiritually nourish other readers in significant ways but can’t quite ever seem to speak to me: Tom Wright is one such very significant author. And in the Bookroom itself, at one point many years ago, I had a whole shelf of books by writers who had been banned from the Roman Catholic Bookshop - I called that our Pell shelf: books by Richard Rohr, Joan Chittister, Paul Collins, Michael Moorwood. One year it seemed to just keep growing! In more recent times I’ve explored works by Mystics, carefully fostered at St Peter’s by Fr Hugh’s Mystic Anonymous group which meets every Wednesday - open to everyone. And there are many other very good spiritual writers represented here today. Good spiritual writers can give us courage to face our own terrors and examine memories that are painful. They help us go to the hard places with the eyes of God. They prompt us to ask: what can I see or re-see in and from this challenging place? And good writers, I think, also give us a language that can help steady our feet; words that enable us to enflesh or put form around our spiritual experience. There are books written and addresses given by Rowan Williams, that I read or listen to again and again. His language, his discourse, moves across many disciplines. Some of his books are much more abstract and conceptual than others - On Augustine and The Edge of Words, and recently Christ - I confess I struggle in reading these. But he has published shorter works, some more recently based on reflection groups he has led. Here the language is much more accessible whilst equally dynamic and engaging: Being Disciples, Being Human, Being Christian. Both Rowan Williams and David Adam encourage us to take the words we use in our prayer life seriously. They encourage us to find prayers to sit with, have them walk them inside us inside as a mantra. And we can only do this when we enter into ‘slow craft time.’ In his book Holy Living, Rowan Williams reminds us to stay present ‘where you are, rather than taking refuge in the infinite smallness of your fantasies.’ Expansion of the heart takes time, and evocatively Williams quotes the Welsh saying: ’life is about inhabiting a great hall within narrow walls.’ (p65). For him, and so many of these writers, life is about learning to be still and listen, to ponder, to be fully present to the place you are in. Language is a vehicle for passing on experienced knowledge. But also, for me, reading or listening to a good theologian offers a language, a vocabulary, upon which I can invite my own experience into and hang my own thoughts upon. I don’t mean here being brainwashed, or unthinking appropriation. The gift of language can provoke our imagination; push further the boundaries of reflection. Language grows us. We can recognise our relationship in God, have courage to go to hard places, but without this growth in God which language offers we risk fossilising, remaining unrealised. Writers like Rowan Williams, Gillian Rose, Richard Rohr offer vocabularies that are living and nuanced. Their works help me understand the power of a word, remind me how full of care I need to be when I speak to others. They draw upon the ‘language’ of other writers; and through their words God speaks to me. And in turn, after my own reflections, hopefully God uses me to speak to others, to you. This talk I’m giving this afternoon is peppered with a vocabulary I have been gifted from the many spiritual writers I have read, which they in turn have been gifted from others. And this is a gift giving whose primary source is the Word made flesh. Christ’s own self living in us. Finally, language itself, of course, takes many forms. Here, I only refer to books, but the language of God speaks through the expressive Arts: music, poetry, dance, painting. God’s Word is found in nature and in silence and the unsaid. The grammar of God is in the nature of created things and lives inside each one of us. All these gifts: language, memory and relationship - involve an-other. We can only speak truthfully, remember rightly, be in health giving relationships, if our words come from an embodied place of Love. If I can begin to see my customers, Peter, James and John, not as alien other but as brothers, which I so often fail to do, then I am starting to know something about the Word made flesh. If our language serves reconciliation, breaks through the illusion of separation and hate, of fear and abuse then our lives start to become aligned into the enlarging the heart of God. I can purchase or read all the books about God I like, but if I do not live first from response to this space of Love, and if my first book is not, as Holy Anthony says, the nature of created things as seen through Love’s eyes, then what I see will be forever only an illusion. We sell Holding Crosses in the Bookroom. Many Carols sung during the Christmas season offer a resonance between the birth and death of Jesus - ‘he bears a bondman’s doom,’ the cheerful Charles Coffin writes. A number of chaplains purchase these Holding Crosses to offer to people in care or in hospital, to hold onto. The gift of the Word made flesh, with all its hope and beauty and pain and vulnerability, the gift of Christ who is born at Christmas, enables us to see through illusion to Reality. And that’s something really worth holding onto.

‘I was born in a limestone valley. To live in a valley is to enjoy a private sky.’ Anam Cara p107 The valley that John O’Donohue grew up in was situated in the Burren, County Clare, West Coast of Ireland. He was a poet, philosopher, priest, mystic but always described himself as a ‘peasant of the valley.’ He was born here in 1956 and is now buried. At John O’Donohue’s funeral in 2008, his brother Pat described him as: ‘a big, beautiful and gentle presence in the world, also a protective presence. When you were with him you felt minded.’ Irish Times, 14th Jan 2008. When I heard him speak in Melbourne in 2001, I felt something of that same presence and mindedness in him. I’d brought along a stack of copies of his works, Anam Cara and Eternal Echoes, for him to sign for St Peter’s Bookroom. At the end of the session I joined a queue of fellow devotees and when I sheepishly presented him with my dozen or so books on his table to sign, he looked at me and smiled, saying - ‘sure, you must love my books awfully to have so many copies.’ Since my first encounter with the writings of John O’Donohue in the 1990s I’ve always resonated with a sense of something very ‘elemental’ in his work: his spiritual wisdom is founded on an understanding of life that is premised on the concrete, the visceral, on what we can directly apprehend with our five senses. Sections of Anam Cara are devoted to our human senses. Philosophically he’s not a fundamentalist, but neither is he a relativist or overly abstracted. His writing gives credence to God’s mystery, but directs us toward what we can trust: the senses and the elements. The images of earth, water, air and fire ripple through all his books. The Four Elements, was first published as a single volume on the 3rd anniversary after O’Donohue’s death in 2011. But the individual blessings themselves contained in this book, first appeared in To Bless This Space Between Us: A Collection of Invocations and Blessings. This was the last work written and recorded by him, before his death. For O’Donohue each element has its own particularity, but is never independent from the other three. In the poem In Praise of Earth, the element of earth is an ‘ancient clay / holding the memory of seasons’ - and holding too memory of ‘The passion of wind / fluency of water / warmth of the fire.’ To Bless This Space Between Us p 70-73. Creation happens because of the combined efforts of the elements. They co-exist with one another. We also have our own human capacity in them; we are made of clay and air and water. The spark of life itself is in us. And John O’Donohue shaped his own vision and way of being in the world through a deep attunement to the images of fire, air, wind and water. The Celtic vision of life, the stories and poetry and song he grew up with and later read about, gave him a framework for his own writing and teaching. For him, having faith in God was not to ascribe to a system of beliefs, but to risk living experientially inside the felt presence of God in our world. His voice was resonant with early Celtic Christians. And he talked about this journey through life in terms of becoming ‘enfaithed.’ So elements have their own shape, their own science, but they like us, have been formed by a Creator - God who, as Trinity, continually participates and delights in creation and invites us to participate in the dance of this delight. But John O’Donohue recognised we are also asked to have custodianship and responsibility for the nurture and health of our elements. And he will sometimes ask our forgiveness from the elements for our human acts of despoiling and pollution, as in this blessing of the earth: Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth For all our sins against her; For our violence and poisonings Of her beauty. To Bless This Space Between Us p 73 For John O’Donohue life is a constant flow of emergence. The earth takes on her own persona, and having been nursed by light at the beginning of time, then holding hope in her heart, became ‘ready to welcome the emergence’ of life: Let us thank the Earth That offers ground for home And holds our feet firm To walk in space open To infinite galaxies. Let us salute the silence And certainty of mountains: Their sublime stillness, Their dream-filled hearts. To Bless This Space Between Us p 72 O’Donohue’s father was a stonemason and there’s a memorable passage in Divine Beauty where he remembers childhood moments when land needed to be cleared. When his uncle and father (levelled) a field, the ground would be opened, the tightly packed layers of caked earth broken and freed; then sometimes an inner mound would reveal where a huge rock lived inside the earth. They’d dig around it, and then with crowbars they’d hoist the stone up out of its lair. For days and even weeks afterwards the stone looked dazed and estranged, stranding unsheltered and alone in the severance of wind and light, a new neighbour in the world of eyes weather and emptiness….as (the rocks) slowly took on the accretions of weather and it erosive engravings, time enabled them to forget the underworld. In a sense this is the disturbance, the revelation and strange beauty that a new piece of sculpture causes in the world. Divine Beauty p135 And there is this same sense in John O’Donohue’s writing. It is as if he is coaxing or encouraging something deep within the human psyche - within each one of us - to emerge through means of the written form. He recognises that ideas surface within us and that as human beings we are materialising. He also loves to break open the meaning of English or Irish words and find new nuances of meaning by examining their etymology. For example, a favourite of mine O’Donohue employs is ‘entwind’ which literally means ‘God unravelling.’ This sense of God streaming apart to reveal new truths, says something of our innate human longing to re-see and re-understand. So too our souls individually emerge gently and gradually in life, like these stones in his valley. And just as no two of all the stones in the valley are ever alike, so no two souls emerging on earth can ever be alike. John O’Donohue died suddenly aged 52 years. He was the eldest of 4 children. His early education was local in the country, then he bordered at St Mary’s College in Galway. At the age of 18 he entered the novitiate at Maynooth, there completing an Arts degree in English and Philosophy, and in 1981 Theology. After being ordained for priesthood he became a curate in a Conamara 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 Turbingen in Germany, which was completed in 1990 and published in Mainz in 1993. During these years in particular, he would have been much more directly exposed to a broader European influence on his own thinking and praying. To date, I don’t believe that this thesis has been published in English. Which is a great pity. Between 1990-95 he was a priest in a number of parishes in County Clare and also had developed a strong interest in the works of the 14th century mystic, Meister Eckhart. Echoes of Memory was published in 1994. In separate essays, what became posthumously published as The Four Elements: Reflections on Nature was also released at this time. In 1995 he began to lecture in Humanities at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. O’Donohue’s breakthrough in terms of public recognition as a writer on spirituality happened with the publication of Anam Cara in 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 was published in 1998; Conamara Blues, a book of poetry, was published in 2000. At the end of that year he ‘retired from priestly life’ and bought a cottage in Conamara which became his sanctuary and writing refuge. The process of writing Divine Beauty, which was published in 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’. I’ve always resonated with John O’Donohue’s identification that we are existential beings; we are essentially alone in the world. Though the earth has been here before us, and will be there to receive us, we are born into the world alone, and we die alone. But like the hidden stillness of mountains there is yet a hidden secret wisdom of life itself. And this is found in silence. There is a deep silence within each of us and at the heart of this inner absence of sound, is stillness and presence. Here is the space of prayer. He says: ‘Deep below the personality and outer image the soul is continually at prayer.’ Eternal Echoes p196 Prayer voices our longing and is the door to our own eternity. Prayer can’t be reduced to simply a sequence of holy words or actions. But ‘prayer issues from an eternal well within you’ Eternal Echoes p 198. We pray ‘in’ the Holy Spirit, not ‘to ’the Holy Spirit. And recognising that we are limited beings of clay, ‘deep prayer of the heart continues within you in a silence that is too deep for words to even reach.’ Eternal Echoes p 198. So we are existentially alone, but deep within us is the capacity of silence, and an awareness of a much deeper presence. Let us bless the grace of water. ……… Let us bless the humility of water Always willing to take shape Of whatever otherness holds it….. To Bless This Space Between Us p 63-65 Water is graceful, yields, it is a ‘liquid root’, a well, ‘a river to continue belief’, is buoyant, we voyage over water, water voyages inside us, when we cry we cry in water. Water is sacred - we are blessed by holy water, baptised in water. Water is the element I would chose to describe O’Donohue’s style of writing. All his books are works of poetry, even his prose reads like poetry. The path of his prose is not linear, not straight but circular; not rational, but not irrational. He likes to explore around ideas, come back to main perceptions, leave gaps, design ideas with threads. His work is always formed and structured, tight and well thought out, but serves to encourage the reader’s thinking to journey downwards towards deeper places within ourselves; to become more thoughtful and aware. Water he tells us prefers the lower places. The Four Elements p 47. The first forms of life were from the primeval ocean. Our source is water. The Four Elements p 4. But it’s not just our deeper inner world he attunes us to; in Anam Cara the body is a sacrament; a mirror of the soul. ‘To be sensual or sensuous is to be in the presence of your own soul,’ he writes. Anam Cara p 85. For John O’Donohue the human journey is one of continually going down - but simultaneously calling us to engage through our senses with the environment, and with others. Water surrounds islands - it links landscapes. Fundamental to all O’Donohue’s work is this pouring out into connection. We are existentially alone but interconnected. For me, having grown up in the 1960s and 1970s it was then a threshold moment in the late 1990s to discover a spiritual writer who could reflect in a new way many authors I was very familiar with: Camus and Koestler and Laing, Kafka. O’Donohue does not refute their ideas, but somehow seems to yield and in so doing drew my eye towards a bigger framework holding the world together - our being not only held in relationship, but born and sustained there . He was able to articulate and build on in a new fresh way an understanding of human existence that when seen and lived experientially through his Celtic Christian lens, reveals the ongoing expansiveness of the world in God. In the early 1990s I had been introduced to Celtic Christianity via writers such as Esther de Waal, David Adam, Philip Newell. But here was a writer who could referentially drawer me back to the pain, the intellectual and philosophical challenges I struggled with earlier in my life and then left unresolved, to suggest new paths towards God through their writings. So John O’Donohue has been a writer enabling me as an adult to intersect back into my own young adulthood and knit in there a small piece of resolution for my soul today. I believe he had much more work and exploration to do with these existential writers and I ponder the further directions his work may have taken. So we begin life alone but already deeply gifted in relationship; held in the watery womb of our mother. O’Donohue writes: when you come into your solitude, you come into companionship with everything and everyone….when you patiently and silently come home to yourself you come into unity and belonging. Anam Cara p 154. In his spiritual writing he crafted words such as ‘whoness’ and ‘whereness’ - pronouns given essence. Who-ness is that unnameable part of self, that unnameable relationship we have with God. We have a relationship with our body, with others, with the landscape. Our primary relationship begins in God. And to know real beauty in the world is to know who-ness. 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.’ Divine Beauty p241. And again and again he shows in his work that to be participatory in the ‘who question’ is to recognise that every relationship we have is personal. Our solitude and silence opens the door into place and belonging and togetherness. Let’s look at the door itself between solitude and companionship. Let’s explore a little more this opening gap, this intersecting edge, this space, this unseen air. Let us bless the air, Benefactor of breath; Keeper of the fragile bridge We breathe across. …… Air along whose unseen path Presence builds its quiet procession; Sometimes in waves of sound, Voices that can persuade Every door of the heart; Often in tides of music That absolve the cut of time. To Bless this Space Between Us p 31-34 Air is a bearer of a hidden reality; ‘home for us in what we can’t see.’ And, in particular, ‘air’ takes on its own presence as the edge between the seen and the unseen, the form and no form, the concrete and the invisible to the outer eye, the in-between. For John O’Donohue, like the early Celtic Christians, this edge is the contemplative space; it’s ‘the hidden world that waits on the edge of things’ Divine Beauty p148. It’s a space which recognises possibility. For him ‘the imagination works on the threshold that runs between light and dark, visible and invisible, quest and question, possibility and fact.’Anam Cara p183. It is into this liminal space, this edge on the world of the visible, the ‘ab esse’ (to be elsewhere), that we are each called to go. For here, ‘absence seems to hold the echo of some fractured intimacy.’ Eternal Echoes p228. Like the early Celtic Christians, O’Donohue recognised that the realm of the invisible is ‘one of the huge regions of our life.’ Eternal Echoes p27. 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 written in the book 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.’ Eternal Echoes p27. 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.’ Eternal Echoes p28 This is also the 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.’ Divine Beauty p170 It 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.’ Eternal Echoes p 214. It is the space of contemplation: ‘the contemplative is the artist of the eternal; the one who listens patiently in the abyss of Nothingness for the whisper of beauty.’ Divine Beauty p 255-56. Here is the world of angels, ‘our secret companions who watch over our journey through this world’ and who ‘watch over that secret threshold where the shy invisible come into visible form.’ Four Elements p 28-29. In Praise of Fire Let us praise the grace and risk of Fire. In the beginning The Word was red, And the sound was thunder, And the wound in the unseen Spilled forth the red weather of being. In the name of the Fire, The Flame And the Light: Praise the pure presence of fire That burns from within Without thought of time….. To Bless This Space Between Us p 10-11 In this collection of his poems, O’Donohue has placed the element of fire under the theme of beginnings. Fire, as he explains, is primal and basic. Unlike the other elements it feasts on the present moment only; the depths of the earth are hot with molten lava, and boiling sulphur meterorites are hurled into our solar system from far off galaxies - exiled from other worlds. Fire itself is amoral; it knows no boundaries nor borders. It is wild and unstoppable, unless governed; it is the passion of love and place of transfiguration. It is the creative force and ephemeral. Meister Eckhart, he tells us, identified the sacred temple in every heart to be the Vunklein - that divine spark within us. The Four Elements p 132. Fire is also the place of domesticity, of Bridget’s hearth - Brighid of the Mantle, encompass us, …Guide our hand in yours, Remind us how To kindle the earth…. The Four Elements p 109 The human longing to come home to the hearth of God are central to O’Donohue’s spiritual writing. The virtues of hope and compassion spring from this longing. And yet, just as our thirst for knowledge and wisdom and homecoming can seem endless, so too do we in our life’s pilgrimage in becoming ‘enfaithed’ slowly realise the endless immensity of God. John O’Donohue was a mystic with feet grounded in a limestone valley. For him faith meant our being encircled by the fire of love between God, Son and Spirit. The more you read his work, or go back to the poetry or stories, you seem to learn anew. His works continue to draw my own vision outwards with a sense that the generosity of God’s love is tireless and ongoing. Much of his writing also circles around our human urges of longing, and our human need to belong. There is a wonderful Irish word O’Donohue draws our attention to which is so very pertinent for us in our contemporary world. The word is 'ducas'. John O’Donohue tells us that in Irish there is no fixed noun for the words ‘longing’ or ‘belonging.’ They are both inferred in the word: ducas. The word ducas has a sense of our being caught up in a greater embrace. Ducas captures an inner sense of belonging in terms of heritage, but also includes ‘those networks of subtle belonging that will always somehow anchor you…’ Eternal Echoes p 259. To return home is also to experience ‘ducas’ and to feel close affinity with a friend is to experience ‘ducas.’ Ducas enables and sustains anam cara. So there’s contentment here, resting, a fulfilment of longing and belonging. For me it’s a word that resonates with the sacred. And in a sense, for us now in 2018 when the world can feel so restless and rootless, so fragile and precarious, where truth feels slippery and doubts and anxieties about the world’s future can take hold of emotions, that to take time to sit in the ebb and flow of O’Donohue’s wisdom of this word ‘ducas’ is to remember that there is something much deeper - a deep longing and a deep belonging - that continues to work for health and wellness in the world. ‘God has a great heart. Only a Divine Artist with such huge longing would have the beauty and tenderness of imagination to dream and create such a wonderful universe.’ Eternal Echoes p 273. References Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom From the Celtic World by John O’Donohue Transworld Publishers 1998 To Bless This Space Between Us by John O’Donohue Doubleday 2008 Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O’Donohue Transworld 2003 Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger to Belong by John O’Donohue Transworld 1998 The Four Elements: Reflections on Nature by John O’Donohue Transworld 2010 #Prayer #God #JohnODonohue #CelticChristianity

St Benedict and Community Living My recent reflection on St Benedict and the Desert Fathers and Mothers with regards to community and family life - in response to a friend’s considerations. ‘May you never be isolated but know the embrace Of your anam cara.’ John O’Donohue I confess to having no idea how the spirituality of Christian contemplation will look in the future. Contemplative networks, New Monastic or otherwise, grow organically and seem to have a life of their own. They are far more common too, I suspect, than many of us realise. No-one can have a monopoly over a relationship with the Divine. Although I have been interested in ‘Returning to the Desert Principles’ and contemplative living as I experience it in my life and the world for many years, I can only write about it here as a beginner. And in fact, what I mention here will be nothing new. But I take up the invitation to write from an experiential point of view. Just in our present times in Melbourne alone we are surrounded, locally and technologically, by so many religious traditions, customs, wisdom stories, and spiritual corridors. Despite the many serious worldwide challenges we face in the 21st century, God’s presence amongst us is made valid by a ‘great crowd of witnesses,’ and this isn’t only Christian witness, contemplative or otherwise. In my own life God always seems to be opening up new pathways. Mark Oakley, Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral London, likes to quote the Sufi, Hafiz, who describes tuning into God as like having the chair pulled from beneath your mind, and watching yourself fall on God. He also likes to quote Meister Eckhart who wrote that to live with a sense of the spiritual is like sitting in a dark room in which, every now and then, God coughs. But the question, ‘in what spirit can we go forth into the future’ in terms of our Christian contemplative tradition, is a valid one. We never sit in isolation in that dark room, no matter how much we think or feel we do; sometimes it’s the least expected cough that reveals the surprise of God’s voice speaking directly into our hearts. God is always bigger than we are, and God is always particular and present in the smallest, the unlikeliest, the most broken of ways and persons. In all this we are called to trust our Christian footsteps into the future, perhaps even if the pathway seems lit only by a single small votive candle. Desmond Tutu speaks of an African word: Ubuntu, meaning, I am because you are. Connection, relationship, that bridge we dare to walk over to be open to God or Jesus or another in our lives, is at the heart of my Christian faith. I can only be, because you are. And the faith that the bridge is there, that the relationship can be there at all, is not because of my doing, but God’s. When I say Yes to faith, as Dag Hammarskjöld understood, it’s God who invites. Without this sense of deep connection and relationship in God we are adrift. For me God is not third person singular, but second person, You. No Rule, no wisdom, no Desert Mother or Father or teacher can make any true and deep sense until we risk faith, and faith at base is a Who inviting relationship, at the heart of Whom is Love. I don’t live in a New Monastic community. I don’t live in a religious community, in terms of a group of women or men coming intentionally to live together with Christian fellowship, with a certain rhythm of life involving the hours, with an eschatological resonance. I don’t live in a Christian Community like L’Arche where there is ministry to the most vulnerable. Although I have a ‘Spiritual Director’ and am part of a Church Community where I both work and worship, I don’t live what would be thought of a traditional religious life. I am an Associate of the Community of the Holy Name, and the I value the connection with this community of Sisters, but feel the regret I cannot give more time for this simplest of commitments to a Religious Order. The life in each of these communities would have its own challenges and difficulties. However, to enter any of these would require great thought, time of discernment involving others, and intentionality on the part of each person. Many of my closest friends are not ‘religious,’ and though my relationship with them feels deeply Christian, the language and symbols of Christianity are not something they would relate to. And more often than not, their friendship feeds me rather than anything I feel I can give them. But nonetheless, I am discovering that when I speak from my heart I find words that allow mutuality and connection. I feel a little bigger and a little smaller; more whole. The collective I live in on a mundane day-to-day basis, is potentially the most fraught, the most common, and the least understood. It will still be around in the future, and it will still be highly challenging. Often it is entered into without a lot of consideration or discernment, but with huge expectations. It’s traditionally called ‘the family’. Some people would argue that the ‘family’ is different from a ‘community.’ Families are varied in form, complex, evolving and interweaving networks, especially for children. I live in a family, but I am part of broader communities. Community can be a township, a church, a sport’s group, a religious order, a hobby group, the place you work or where you shop. It is where people gather with a particular purpose; literally, ‘together with’. These are generally more ‘intentional’ groups, but equally fluid. And in these chosen communities you are either a part of or not, in or out, by choice or not by choice. But I believe that at essence this distinction between ‘family’ and ‘community’ is one of the many divisions that Christ sought to break down. Whilst retaining a real recognition about the boundaries and expectations, the legal ramifications in the world concerning their differences, Christ sought to show us that true life is grounded in communion and love, in relationship, in mutuality. Such freeing up of these boundaries is subversive and threatening. This is because in God’s kingdom our dependence for all things comes from God. Politics in God’s collective consists of the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The redemptive kingdom of God continually seeks to break into our world; present, alongside, but we are not always open to receive. God’s kingdom asks us to grow in a conscious awareness of divine action in our lives. To commune in this way, all relationships become a priority, all creation manifests God’s presence, nothing considered pure or un-pure is left out in God’s kingdom. The family in which I live in consists of three persons: myself, my husband, and daughter who is 14 years old. Families are complex and move in all sorts of both hidden and exposed ways. All families have their brokenness, and their potential for healing. Communities are like this too, but families (particularly our early childhood family) dig deep into our souls, they form us and manifest something throughout the rest of our lives, in what we take into the wider world. But what can happen in a ‘family’ is that it becomes a clan. All families and all communities - New Monastic or otherwise - always run the risk of becoming a clan. Clans are groups of people who are inwardly focused, there are explicit or implicit rules of conduct, and these rules are based on power dynamics and scapegoating. Often there is a strong pecking order and though other people can be invited in, they never quite belong; they are always tinged by something of the ‘other.’ In clans there’s a strong sense of who’s in and who’s out, who’s major and whose minor. Many people who claim they have ‘no religion’ or who loosely describe themselves as ‘atheist’ actually ascribe to the family their life’s ultimate meaning and value. It doesn’t mean they become a clan, but crisis or trauma does become something much harder to negotiate. Also, for me, family as meaning only of itself is not enough. But I recognise how easy it can be to have family as your life’s meaning when the members seem well and are surrounding you; work can be fulfilling: though life may be recognised as not perfect and the world full of problems, it is personally comfortable and pleasurable whilst always there is something to aim for. Besides, there’s so much to distract and keep one too busy to think too seriously about meaning. The general ticking over ‘your own’ family can mean you don’t have to think or question too much about the meaning of existence whilst living a comfortable life. It’s very hard to find a toolbox in the Christian tradition that equips you with a Way, helps you shape a life with others, that is meaningful, relatable, full of wisdom, common sense and attuned to the particular. When I encountered the Rule of St Benedict, in my late 20s, with the interpretative insight of such people as Esther De Waal, it helped me make sense of and understand the basic workings of a healthy human life both individually and collectively. Until I encountered the Rule I had no framework for a Way of living. And although I’ve since come to recognise that this is the beauty and the extraordinary challenge of Christ himself being the Way, no other Rule or Way that I know of could have met me precisely in the manner that I needed to be at that time. It has been formative for how I understand the workings of a healthy ‘family’ and ‘community’ today. It seems bizarre to me now that I, then a university postgraduate, a secondary school teacher and recently divorced, needed to learn the basic building blocks of a balanced lifestyle. So I don’t think St Benedict was being disingenuous or overly modest when he describes the Rule as ‘a little Rule for beginners.’ I think he wrote it for a bunch of people just like me: whose only previous experience of family or community living had been that of a clan, or at best, a well-intentioned group of people with a lot of misguided interpersonal dynamics. Tangibly here in the Rule was the instruction that we each need time for work, time for study, time for prayer, time to eat, time to rest, time for togetherness, time to be apart. The Rule is about how a group of persons can come together and live inside a rhythm of life that recognises we are connected to something bigger than ourselves, and of which we are also a part of. This connection is linked into a much bigger story based on remembering and contains eschatological resonances, all held in mystery. It’s ‘way’ makes common sense, offers spiritual meaning and brings life. It’s founded on right-relationship. ‘Let Christ be the chain that binds you,’ Benedict says. In his Rule, St Benedict always points away from himself and toward Christ. Christ is the heart of community and family. Christ in God, feeding us, leading us by the spirit. There is space and time given, respect for and a place for each person. The stranger at the door is welcomed, fed and sheltered. With Love present like a living well of water, a birdbath continually filled by rainfall in the middle of a garden, communities and families are much less likely to be susceptible to becoming a clan. This rhythm of life is a framework, and like learned patterns of prayer it carries us through all seasons in our life. This isn’t a rhythm that sets one up only for the good times or when life makes sense. As a path that is a growing into, a process, it offers a course through times of deep suffering and dereliction as well. Faith can never be chosen, is not a commodity to be picked up - but it’s a Way. At root, it is the invitation to journey inside and with God, Love. The Rule of Benedict recognises all of this; Love is at the centre and rhythm of our life. Any new or old monastic community must continually come back to this foundational rock. Still today, in my family the more I seek to attune myself to this rhythm the more I recognise how paradoxically freeing, feeding this rhythm of life is. It’s not a head thing only; it’s a whole body movement. With focus as ‘other’ grounded in Christ, on Love, the rhythm reminds me that it’s in relationship with others that I find out who I am. It’s in my relationship with God in my cell that my imagination is stretched, grace received, compassion enlarged. Working alongside or leading others helps me see gifts and attributes in myself that I have not realised I had before, and the plentiful and amazing gifts of others. Praying with others brings intimacy and forgiveness. Study and reading and writing teaches me coherence and breadth of understanding, whilst rest is the circuit breaker, the time when everything is let go so my body can begin again refreshed. It’s very hard to live a life in this balance, and I recognise the gaps in my own life: the propensity to sit at desks, to be inside too much, those inward hurdles that resist me from connecting more directly with the earth and garden. There are many neighbours I prefer not to know about, and periods when I want to write on well beyond the time I need to go to bed. And another glass of wine could do me no harm. Benedict’s Rule reminds me how crooked I am when I’m left to my own devices. The Desert Monastics continually feed my imagination spiritually, but it’s the Rule that has grounded me bodily. The Rule reminds me to get back on a path where to be a ‘whole’ human person means I need balance - time for solitude, time to be in our close community, and time to be in the ‘market place.’ It’s from St Benedict that I’ve learned the value of stability, of continual need to be open to growth ‘conversatio morum’, and of obedience, being in the Latin, literally - hearing in the direction of. ‘Renunciation’ and ‘fleeing’ are part of the same action. They are subversive in that they say No to that which distracts our orientation toward God. We flee that which we sense seeks to deflect us from our relationship with Christ. They are a recognition that, ‘this is enough’; I have been given what I need - ‘my daily bread’. They say: I need to stay here and say no, or, I need to flee before I succumb. Such actions recognise that we are not, no matter how wealthy, talented, powerful, in relationship with God on our own terms. ‘Renunciation’ and ‘fleeing’ help us know the fruitfulness of stability, of reconversion in God, and emphasise the need to keep listening. St Benedict learned deeply from the Desert Mothers and Fathers. ‘Go to your cell, it will teach you everything,’ says Abba Moses. This is Christ saying, ‘the kingdom of heaven is within you.’ In owning and learning to make our inner cell our home we find heaven so we can then move out and connect with others, in family, community, market place. This is a continuing practice for each one of us every day of our lives. From the Desert teachings Benedict learned about human weakness and difference and of true fellowship being rooted in Christ. As Rowan Williams illustrates for us in telling the story of Abba Moses and Abba Arsenius, one who celebrated with the angels in a boat eating honey cakes, and the other severely ascetical who sat in his boat in silence with the Holy Spirit, we are each and every one of us, called in a very particular way, a personal way, a kind way, to be in relationship with our God. And we are to show compassion toward one another. And compassion towards ourselves for our own weaknesses. Benedict has taken the teaching of the Desert Mothers and Fathers and shaped them to become internally consistent for healthy community living. We are surrounded by a great richness and variety of religious traditions and contemplative communities. In how to make sense of any of it we need to start with what we are given: our bodies, our breath, our feet on the ground, our hands holding. We each have a path given, an Interior Castle which Teresa of Avila teaches us to explore, the inner rooms of self, so that we can begin to know ourselves. As the Dalai Lama has said, if you are given a Christian Tradition, don’t become a Buddhist. Own your inherited and given path. However, to embody any of this we need the basic building blocks of life lived in balance. In order to live creatively and dynamically with others in family or community relationships St Benedict gives us a wonderful toolbox. Like the Desert Monastics, the key to the toolbox is Christ. So Fleeing, Renunciation, Solitude and Community are all essential in life, but at root is relationship; relationship with God, with one another so we become ourselves. And on a day-to-day basis, in very mundane ways, practising being grounded and present in Christ, I often feel that darned chair pulled right from under my mind so once more, very scarily, I seem to fall into God. Carol O’Connor October 2017

If we are to be blindsided by history, it will probably be the consequence not of unresolved disputes but of unexamined consensus. The Givenness of Things, p I82 A reflection upon Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things This book of essays by Marilynne Robinson really challenged me this Lenten season. Over four sessions, on a Sunday, a group of us have been meeting at St Peter's Eastern Hill and focused on four different chapters. In terms of Robinson’s social, political, intellectual and spiritual considerations, I resonate. Her words are firmly and morally premised on a love for humanity, which comes out of the Gospels. Her fresh expression, the confident, concise, subtle nature of her thought patterns, I have also delighted in. Where I’m challenged is in the actual breadth of her knowledge. She seems to be as at home in the discourse of science as she is with politics or Calvinism. I feel as though in these Lenten sessions we have barely scraped the surface of her thinking, and I have felt a certain unease and quiet frustration with this. And yet, always Robinson’s at-homeness in these spheres admits to gaps in knowledge, and, at times her confession to being ‘grossly inadequate’. I take her words as genuine - she reminds us that she is not an historian, a scientist, a politician. Robinson is well known as a fiction writer. In fiction and here, as an essayist, she is a person whose mind is alive to the contemporary shape of the world in a deeply Christian way. In these essays she is always opening up discussion - never shuts it down. She draws the reader in, only to draw the reader out. Her prose style acts in such a way that your mind has to wriggle through the paragraphs. The reader is not given the pleasure of straight sequential or logical thinking. It’s hard reading because Robinson has the knack of making the reader’s mind work: she often writes a series of statements, and it’s up to us to make the connections. Her real interest she says in the chapter on Value, the one I chose to lead and under discussion here, is in the ‘deep...tectonics that …produces the energy behind all these surface tremors and disruptions.’ Her interest is in being a witness to what is happening morally in our world today. Where do we need to worry, to caution, to call out those ideologies or modes of behaviour that can potentially pull the moral carpet up from under a nation’s feet? Robinson covers a number of social and ethical themes in her work. However, each theme is often examined via a number of entrances. In Value she begins with reference to a nation on the brink of moral collapse: Germany in the Second World War. But the first two words of the essay are a name: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Most of the essay is preoccupied with forces that take a culture or nation into a downward moral spiral. This collection of essays was published in 2015 (written probably the year before) but lines like this are unmistakeable in their reference: ‘There are old men now who spend their twilight using imponderable wealth to overwhelm the political system’; and again, ‘imagine how great a boost to the aging ego would come with taking a nation’s fate out of its own unworthy hands and shaping to one’s particular lights - which may not be, in fact, enlightened, even rational ….’. Her words are prophetic to contemporary America in 2017, as they are based on a much deeper malaise. That she did not open this chapter with the name of the leading perpetrator responsible for revealing the ‘deviancy of which a modern society is capable’ in 20th century Germany, but instead with someone who sought to see clearly and worked to have a nation remember that which it most valued, who was a ‘beautiful model of Christian behaviour over, against, and within a terrible moment in history’, immediately tells us where she herself is positioned. Bonhoeffer is a credible moral compass. Her words are predicated on the life of such a sentinel of Christian values in a world that finds itself flummoxing. Though she warns against being predictive about the best or the worst ‘propensities of a civilisation’ in the present moment, and cautions too against seeing ‘moral collapse as imminent, brought on by big government, or by departures from whichever construction of religion they consider sufficient to stay divine wrath…’ Robinson nevertheless acknowledges the very real ground for ‘anxiety about the future of the West and the world.’ For her, ‘no society at any time is immune to moral catastrophe.’ Though Marilynne Robinson begins this chapter on Value with reference to one of 20th century’s greatest heroes of the faith, she nonetheless concentrates most of her subsequent discussion on what does a world at risk of losing a core sense of its own moral value actually look like. She calls out other Mammons of history: the Fabians with ‘all the tedious little plots they spun to lower workers’ already wretched wages...’, the ‘early fascist movement Action Française’, the Poor Laws dating back to Edward VI. In order to understand ‘value’, which is often paraphrased as ‘that which people value’, we need not only to move into a deeper place concerning what this means, but know it through its periods of loss in human history. Even this act of atavism itself (the drawing upon history itself to further one’s own argument) is taken to task. Psychologically too, there are Mammons who need to be dethroned. In our Western society there have been many times when ‘blaming the victim’ leads to the poor tending to blame themselves. And in today’s world ‘we have a new concept…the unworthy poor.’ As a creative writer, as well as essayist, she is compelled to use metaphor to illustrate what is happening in us during times in history when ‘bad old impulses’ due to ‘alarm or by tedium or simply at random’ will suddenly assert themselves. Whilst on the one hand acknowledging there is no such thing as a ‘reptilian brain’, she nonetheless falls back on this need to ‘describe’ such impulse before it can properly be ‘understood’. For her, how else can one begin to explain the resurgence of capital punishment in America as a means for deterrence. Likewise, where else does one begin in trying to explain the historical ‘catastrophe in Germany and Europe’ of their ‘conscious and thoroughgoing accommodation of all that was worst, corrupting science and philosophy to embrace notions like purity and authenticity and racial memory’? Likewise, too, how else to explain, but from the description of a reptilian brain, the ‘value’ a prominent English politician revealed on her last trip to the UK. In a discussion about a bell curve, he ascribed 15% of people at the bottom, and 2% at the top in terms of IQ. From this he concluded that ‘a considerable fraction of society … are not intellectually capable of anything better than poverty, so no point in trying to design policy around them.’ As we read this chapter, the vibrations of its title are like the slow gong of a brass bell asking us the same question again and again: what is that which we value? It is something that is knitted into our very fabric, individually and collectively, but what is it that can be eroded so subtly from us? 'Value' is something that informs and motivates action in all spheres of our lives: politics, art, economics. Especially today, economics. As with many other important attributes concerning what it means to live life fully under discussion in this book (grace, memory, givenness, theology, awakenness, humanism), although ‘value’ is vital, it is also complex and subject to ambiguity and corruption. But also, as with each other subject, there are qualities about ‘value’ that are essential. A quality Robinson values, though again has caused her great perplexity and confusion for seeing its erosion in America, is the attribute of generosity. ‘I had always thought that the one thing I could assume about my country is that it is very generous. Instinctively and reflexively generous … our saving grace was always generosity, material and, often, intellectual and spiritual.’ A ‘subcategory’ of this is the quality of rescuing, by means of skill, experience, and aid, people in a crisis. Another attribute of ‘value’, and here she enters via the doors of economics, of pragmatism, is the ‘creative class.’ Brahms and Shakespeare wore livery to denote them as not being beggars or vagrants. Mozart dined with servants. Robinson highlights the ‘arbitrarily’ narrow definition, not only of economists, but of people’s notions of ‘value’ generally. Mozart, Brahms, Shakespeare are good for tourism. They generate income. Is this why we value them? There is for Robinson a plutocracy, a materially privileged group that has no interest in meaning; they would have us believe income is all. But actually, what is of intrinsic value is what is given to us in the music, the literature, the art, the sacred sites, the feast days. The Givenness of Things is a series of essays about that which brings meaning into a human life. In this chapter, Robinson works to show us that meaning is not found in materiality or power or economics for their own sake. What we value shows us what our meaning is. And what is of true value is thought and art, ‘with humanity itself as an object of reverence.’ If we revere money and power then we do so at our peril. It is a figure like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who teaches us that we must live up to the challenges of our times; we must learn to see clearly, otherwise there will be more bitter lessons of history that await us. The Givenness of Things By Marilynne Robinson Farrar. Straus and Giroux, 2016 Available from St Peter's Bookroom $33.95

A Short Reflection on the Gospel of John Chapter 3, after Easter 2020. In the lectionary Holy Communion readings for this week we’ve been hearing from the Gospel of John. And, in particular, John Chapter 3. This Chapter begins with the Jewish leader, Nicodemus, visiting Jesus, in the night. Night is being used figuratively here: Nicodemus' visit is in secret and he is in need of spiritual illumination. This is not an attempt to outwit, contest or expose Jesus as a charlatan but a genuine search for understanding. Acknowledging Jesus as a teacher, his Rabbi, when Jesus speaks of the need to be born from above, Nicodemus asks: 'How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?' 5 Jesus answered, 'Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be astonished that I said to you, "You must be born from above." The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.'  (John Chat 3:4-7) It’s the phrase : ’You must be born from above’ that I would like to pause with here for a moment. The Greek word translated here as ‘above’ is (ἄνωθεν) anōthen. More usefully perhaps for us, it also translates here as ‘anew’ or ‘again.’ Our word, ‘above’ has spatial connotations, with an overlay of meaning to do with the power of higher status, or loftiness. However, to be born ‘anew’ strengthens that sense of willingness to risk a passage of inner renewal. To be ‘born’ implies there is a death of some sort, and here the breakage is to do with loosening control over our passions, or in more contemporary sense, unhooking ourselves from a sticky ego. Ego: that very human instinctual clinging on to self identity. Jesus’ words - ‘the wind bloweth where it chooses’ - is an invitation into a new way of living not governed by the ego. ‘Wind’ has the same cognate root of ‘Spirit’: pneuma and pneumatos. This is an invitation we can choose to accept; in this we have agency. But the process of ourself in the life of the Spirit we are never given full mastery. In this way, we are not the inventors of our own selfhood. We can hear the wind, and be in it, but the Spirit remains a mystery constantly inviting us to creatively undergo inner renewal. Nicodemus’ encounter with Jesus here resonates for me with last Sunday’s reading, again from John. Here, at John 20, after Jesus’ resurrection, the disciples have locked themselves inside the house where they have gathered for fear of the authorities. Jesus, unexpectedly, appears to them, bidding them peace and then breathes on them, or ‘into them’ saying receive the Holy Spirit - the pneuma. But remember in the reading, Thomas, one of the disciples wasn’t with them. And later Thomas declares that in order for the risen Lord to be meaningful for him, not only would he need to see Jesus, but to feel the wounds on his body. The following week Thomas is with the others in the house this time, and Jesus comes amongst them again. And this time revelation comes to Thomas through Jesus’ invitation to touch his body. English-American 20th poet Denise Levertov writes of this moment when Thomas touches Jesus’ body: But when my hand led by His hand’s firm clasp entered the unhealed wound, my fingers encountering rib-bone and pulsing heat, what I felt was not scalding pain, shame for my obstinate need, but light, light streaming into me, over me, filling the room as if I had lived til then in a cold cave, and now coming forth for the first time, the knot that bound me unravelling, I witnessed all things quicken to color, to form…..(1) We witness here Thomas being born anew. He’s has said ‘yes’ to the invitation, and when he touched the wounds of Jesus he has also touched the pulse of life itself. The light streaming into him has not only changed him but the world around him also is revealed as more alive than ever. Being born anew is to receive illumination and new understanding. To be born anew in the spirit need not be as dramatic as Thomas’ revelation. Much more often for us it is that slow letting go, risking withdrawal of our instinctual human passions to let the Spirit in, unravel inner knots that bind us. It is to be like Nicodemus, seeking out Jesus in the night and listening to the Word. This week our Gospel readings have helped us recognise Jesus as the Eternal Word of Life. He is the coming of the light which is generous and profuse and life giving. To be born anew, is that turning away our gaze from a dark cold cave towards that warm, profuse, generous life-giving light. ............................................................ 1. The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov Introduction by Eavan Boland Ed Paul A Lacey and Anne Dewey New Directions Publications 2013 from: St Thomas Didymus P 844

As we continue to wait, watching the story of Coronavirus unfold around us day by day, affecting each of us in different ways, as we also evaluate decisions made by political and medical leaders there’s an increasing sense of being worn down and of carrying a great weight. When I travel to pick up food supplies or work I’m noticing now more people out and about on the roads and in the city. This is despite the Government lockdown still being in place. That human longing, almost at any cost, to be out moving amongst others in community is very strong. Financial hardship, stress, uncertainty about the future, increase in domestic violence makes it very difficult to be still. Our rapidly changing global and local terrain makes us restless. However, this time also continues to also be a landscape that is marked by many spontaneous unexpected acts of kindness. Unlooked for, gratuitous but powerfully felt acts of goodness continue to be shown by all sorts of people towards all sorts of other people, strangers and friends, in need and distress. But despite all this, and despite the Government assistance at this time, there are those who in their heightened sense of isolation, loneliness and helplessness - fall through the cracks. A saint whose story, in more recent years, for me has broken free from being cliche is St Francis. He is a saint who fell through the cracks. And despite all improbability, found the God of Love right there in that dark deep crevice. We can interpret the life of St Francis in many different ways - depending on the lens we look through. The story of St Francis, who lived at the turn of the 13th century, on one level makes a rollicking good read. His father was a wealthy merchant. Francis was well educated, loved fine clothes and the high life. He was a romantic figure who, as young man, became a knight fighting for Perugia in its town’s warfare with Assisi. Locked up for a year as a prisoner of war in a dungeon, after release he suffered physical pain for the rest of his life. He was filled with longings, passions, partying and dreaming. But prayer became increasingly important and in early 13th century he had his famous vision: sitting in a dilapidated church, before the San Daminiano cross he heard Christ speak to him: ‘Francis, go and repair my house, which as you see is falling completely into ruin.’ And so began his life of radical poverty, wandering with his brothers teaching the life of ‘littleness’ within a larger church. He founded an order, wrote a Rule but later struggled with its overwhelming success and resigned as its Head. This ‘littleness’ of St Francis is not one of subservience to an big external force. What St Francis discovered I think is what Rowan Williams describes the yielding to the ‘transforming power of acknowledging dependence on an unconditional source of affirmation.’ Note well, ‘littleness’ here is not about yielding to an alien force. This is a power which affirms us deep down inside our very self. The more Francis let go, entered into the depths of his own suffering with a strong felt sense of the Love of God, the more he discovered the deeply unconditional nature and profound nurture of God in his own life. With God, he was then able to climb down into the cracks and reach into the brokenness of other people’s lives and bring comfort. His own stigmata was symbolically the kinaesthetic marks of God’s love pouring into the suffering of the world. St Francis channelled peace. He found joy and became the sign of a God whose well of love is endless, a God who could be named and praised even in the greatest suffering. There is a famous story of St Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio. A wolf was terrorising that Italian town and keeping it under siege. No one could go out. St Francis did, met the wolf, named him as his brother and commanded the wolf in the name of God to cease its attack on the township. The wolf bowed its head and relented going back into Gubbio as a friend of St Francis. I’m not telling this story to inspire us to disregard our present Government instructions for saving lives by staying at home. Far from it. But because this story begs the questions: what wolf is it that terrorises and keeps our own heart under siege? Is it fear? Uncertainty? Suffering? St Francis was able to venture into these hard places with courage and the love of God. He was transformed here, and from here able to transform others. This is where the love of God is most with us during this time of COVID-19. In the cracks of our hearts and our lives. When we, like St Francis, notice and name the fears that keep us under siege, like that wolf at Gubbio, then we can offer something that’s very real, life giving and transformative to another. Friend or stranger.

This is the third of three addresses by Carol O’Connor given at a Quiet Day, directed by Carol and musician and spiritual director Cath Connelly, for the Institute for Spiritual Studies. The title of the Quiet Day was from Psalm 72: ‘Put your ear to the ground and listen.’ The Day was held at St James Anglican Church, Point Lonsdale, on Saturday the 25th of March 2017. PLACE OF THE CROSS Esther de Waal, in A World Made Whole, emphasises that the early Celtic Christian community saw the cross as a place to perform liturgy. Originally the crosses would have been wooden and used for processional purposes, kept in place in the centre of the monastery. In the 8th century there were the large stone crosses, standing as high as 15 or 20 feet. The great high crosses were decorated, originally with abstract interlacing spiral designs, and later with panels presenting the story of God’s work of salvation. There were crosses, too, which depicted the life of the eremitical desert fathers and mothers. I began my first address with words by Rowan Williams: ‘theology itself is not a great block of granite stone around which we wander.’ The cross too is not simply a stone around which we wander; it is not an end in itself. Today, we’ve contemplated the cross as an icon that is always pointing to something else. The life of Jesus doesn’t finish at the Crucifixion. We are not asked to pick up our cross simply for the sake of it; not asked to embrace suffering simply for the sake of suffering. The image of the cross beckons us to move through this suffering and find the fullness of life in the garden of resurrection and God’s compassion. The cross is a window, a passageway through to a reversed way of beholding the world and our movement in it. Its direction always points us towards a living relationship with God. We cannot hold on to anything beyond its proper season and fruitfulness in us. In my first address, I talked about the movement of the cross stretching upward. This is a movement that also invokes God down to be amongst us. In my second address, I focussed on the downward movement of the cross. Here the cross calls us to be earthed, encourages us to go down into a deep space of silent listening and draw up the energy of the Word into our centre. Here we recognise God’s Incarnation in Jesus, and celebrate Christ’s presence with us in the world. My three points here focus on the movement of the arms of the cross in relation to God’s Spirit and the Trinity. Firstly, like the Beatitudes, the arms of the cross encourage us to live life a different way from how the world would normally teach us. In stretching out from a circled centre they ask that life not be held on to, but given generously. They are arms of offering. Secondly, the arms reach out, but - because they have physical form - they stop at a certain point. This is obvious, of course. Physical form can only exist in space, in air. In ‘In Praise of Air’, John O’Donohue writes: ‘Air along whose unseen path / Presence builds its quiet procession’ and ‘Air: kingdom of the spirit’, ‘eternal breath.’ (O’Donohue 31) The physical form of the cross ends but the work of the spirit goes on into the future. On this earth we are a pilgrim people who travel in the hope of the promise given to us by God. We walk through life in the faith of this ‘eternal breath.’ We are so used to thinking of absence or space as meaning nothing. Like silence, air is invisible; it looks like absence. But what if air means the continuation of form, in a yet to be formed way? It’s the place of the ‘yet to be.’ That is, potential for the Holy Spirit in our lives to really get a look-in and make a difference. It allows unseen paths to unfold. And thirdly, the arms of the cross stretch out and call us to embrace others and creation into God’s encircling centre. In other words, they ask of us to have arms of invitation, arms of hospitality, willing to be inclusive, to bring in. We are asked to embrace one another not on our terms, but God’s terms: God’s cross and God’s compassion. STRETCHING OUT FROM CIRCLED CENTRE - GIVING & GOD-CENTERED Here are words from the Carmina Gadelica (De Waal 77): I am giving Thee worship with my whole life, I am giving Thee assent with my whole power, I am giving Thee praise with my whole tongue, I am giving Thee honour with my whole utterance... I am giving Thee affection with my whole sense; I am giving Thee my existence with my whole mind, I am giving Thee my soul, O God of all gods. Like the Beatitudes, these lines are not person-centred, but God-centred. The emphasis is Thee, not I. It’s a praise poem. And underlying this praise is the recognition that I want to give, because I have been given to so much. There is gratitude here, a recognition of God’s generosity. Sometimes in the Church the tradition of Celtic Christianity is dismissed because it has been picked up and distorted by New Age Movements. Its interests also appear to be localised, based on far too many miracles and parallel Irish narratives. Hagiographies and apocryphal texts abound. There seem to be at least three Bridgets, and several St Patricks. I wonder too if it’s dismissed because it’s thought the Celtic Christians lacked a systematic and sophisticated theology. During this period of nearly 600 years the peoples weren’t so hooked on the debates happening on the continent or in Rome, because they lived in groups on the fringes of the Empire. There were various Synods, such as the Synod of Whitby in 664 determining the date of Easter. but mostly they concentrated on their own local preoccupations. What if there’s another way of looking at this? What if during these centuries Christianity was moving by the work of the spirit into a pre-existing culture that was very grounded and possessed a strong identity? The spirit of the Gospel moved slowly into these lands, and so flourished uniquely. The heads of ruling Irish dynasties came to be the Abbots of monasteries; they presided over settlements that were autonomous units. In this way, the structure of the monasteries remained similar to the pre-existing culture - they were walled townships. And each of these monasteries created their own Monastic Rule. As I mentioned in my first address, over time many forms from both cultures fused: the triad and the Trinity, the circle and the cross. There is also the Celtic Goddess, Bride goddess of poetry and the hearth, who becomes St Bridget. This fusion was not always harmonious. The formation of ecclesiastical structures alongside the monastic townships was generally okay, but monasteries would sometimes go into battle with other monasteries. But that this fusion happened at all tells us something not just about the pre-existing Celtic culture that had received Christianity, but much about those first Christians coming to these lands. They teach us that how the Gospel is presented and shared, is as integral to its actual message. The first Christians coming to Ireland, Scotland and Wales were soaked in the Christian Gospels, full of patristic and classical scholarship, but were - for the most part - people who wanted to share the message, not hit people over the head with it. These are saints with generosity. Brendan, Patrick, Columba, even Columbanus - who must have been the most tiresome of saints - for all their humanity, moved with the Gospels in a grounded way, a faithful way, and a living way. And this is Jesus’ teaching of the Beatitudes: ‘how’ a person turns toward the Kingdom of God is as essential as to ‘what’ the Kingdom of God is. In fact, the kingdom is this movement. ‘Blessed’, that is, you are oriented toward God or close to God when…. I have chosen the Eugene Peterson translation (Peterson 1434) to help us re-hear just how radical this ‘how’ we turn is: ‘you are blessed when you lose that which is most dear to you.’ When Jesus saw his ministry drawing huge crowds he climbed a hillside. Those who were apprenticed to him, the committed, climbed with him. Arriving at a quiet place, he sat down and taught his climbing companions. This is what he said: ’You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. ‘You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. ‘You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are - no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought. ‘You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat. ‘You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full’, you find yourselves cared for. ‘You’re blessed when you get your inside world - your mind and heart - put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. ‘You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family. ‘You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom. ‘Not only that - count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens - give a cheer, even! - for thought they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.’ The Beatitudes aren’t about making everyone think exactly as you think. They’re about when you lose everything, then you start finding God. Because it’s only really then that you can begin to see just how generous God is. You begin to see how much is being offered. You are blessed, Columba, being sent into exile? What? Well, it was only then, at the very end of his rope, that he learned as a monk, that turning toward God was not waging a war over a missal. Turning toward God was about facing the unknown with faith and founding a community grounded in God. In the lives of the Celtic Christian saints we often witness people who feel they don’t need to defend the Bible; who don’t need to even defend God. Maybe this is because they recognised the work of the Spirit changing their very own arms as they stretched out in the sort of way St Kevin does. In Heaney’s poem (Heaney 20), St Kevin stretches out his arms in prayer. The cell is small so his arms have to stretch outside. A blackbird decides to nest there in his hand, lays an egg, so St Kevin keeps his arms outstretched for a long time. He didn’t fight the blackbird or try to reason with her that nesting in his hand was an absurd or potentially hazardous action. This is a story about the spirit at work in Kevin. It wasn’t the blackbird who changed him but his opening to let the spirit of prayer work in him. How often do we feel we need to win the argument or make other people see reason? How often do we fail to let in the spirit in to change our own arms simply because we see it as a sign of weakness? Heaney goes to some trouble to tell us that in this stretching St Kevin is not being weak, but really strong - it’s the work in him of divine restraint. In God, in prayer, Kevin is able to be bigger than his own very self for the love of a blackbird. St Kevin and the Blackbird by Seamus Heaney And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird. The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside His cell, but the cell is narrow, so One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands And lays in it and settles down to nest. Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked Into the network of eternal life, Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown. * And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow, Imagine being Kevin. Which is he? Self-forgetful or in agony all the time From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms? Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees? Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head? Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river, ‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays, A prayer his body makes entirely For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird And on the riverbank, forgotten the river’s name. The Beatitudes divest us of our ego driven agendas. They tell us that when we get our ‘inside world’, our mind and heart, put right, then we see God in the outside world. They call us to be ‘full of care’ as we relate to one another in the world. In other words they ask us to stretch out our arms to others, and keep holding our arms out even when the truth makes us, or others, really uncomfortable. This is about living with compassion. Many of these early Christian monks moving into these Celtic lands at this time, it seems to me, were prepared to stretch out their own Christian imagination. God affirms and sustains all cultures in new ways when arms are prepared to stretch out. In the little scribbled marginalia poems of Latin Primers or the richly illustrated Illuminated Gospels, are priceless glimpses into the language of the spirit itself at work with these early Celtic Christian lands. Their legacy shows us a people who knew how to walk in the kingdom of God. This takes me to my second point: STRETCHING OUT FROM CIRCLED CENTRE - ENDINGS MEAN NEW BEGINNINGS The arms of the cross end because they point to the future: Air: reservoir of the future Out of which our days flow, Ferrying their shadowed nights, The invisible generosity, That brings us future friends And sometimes stones of sorrow On which our minds refine. (O’Donohue 31) Here is my final story about St Cuthbert. Soon after he died in 687 his body had to be moved from Lindisfarne because of the invasion of the Danish Vikings. During the next 300 years his body was moved several times to different places because of these invasions. David Adam retells the story about these moves, including this episode in 995 (Adam 119-120) when he was moved from Yorkshire. The company of monks accompanying the shrine carrying the carriage numbered about 500, and at one point the carriage became stuck in mud….. The bishop commanded that the great travelling company should stay where they were, and spend their time in fasting and prayer, that they might get some indication of where they should go next. Towards the end of this time a monk named Eadmer said that he had received a vision and that Cuthbert wanted them to go to Dunholm. Almost as soon as this was mentioned it was discovered that the carriage with coffin and relics could be moved without much effort. But now where was this place Cuthbert wanted to rest? As they were not sure of the direction, they were delighted to see ahead of them two women. One was calling to the other, ‘Have you seen my dun cow? It has gone missing.’ The other replied, ‘Aye, I have seen it, it is at Dunholm - I’ll show you where I mean.’ Once again everyone was satisfied, those who did not know where to go and those who had an idea. All of the monks decided to follow the women. It was a strange procession, with a woman at the front calling her cow, a bishop and monks and the holy relics of Cuthbert and other saints following. The last part of the journey was again difficult, for the place was thick with trees and thorn bushes. Yet on the top of the near island there was a grass-covered plateau where the dun cow was grazing. This was to be the new home for the Cuthbert Folk. The bishop ordered prayers of thanksgiving to be said immediately. This is a depiction of at a point when the pilgrimage has become a bit of a schemozzle. Depicted here is a mixture of visions, superstitions, hunches, practicalities figured out; women’s instinct and feminine intuition are just as vital in the decision-making process as the Bishop’s mandate and blessing. It’s a story contextualised within a larger framework of violence, by this stage going back 300 years. But here is God’s story as well, which is much bigger. As soon as the group arrive at Dunholm (Durham, I take it, where Cuthbert remains today under the High Altar) they recognise the place as the one, they all know it. Theirs has been a journey undertaken in faith that eventually they would find their way, no matter how long it took. We so often want life to be neat and ordered. To be dualistic is about as complicated as we would like things to be. But the spirit doesn’t work that way. In the pilgrimage stories of St Brendan, Columba, and Columbanus, they journeyed with the Gospels, but they recognised that they only knew half the story. None of them seemed to know eventually where they would end up, though Brendan had faith he would come home. But they all trusted in the spirit to lead them, they had an openness to life’s new challenges, and a sense of an inner knowledge of the workings of the human heart. No journey is without need of markers, especially one in the spirit. Dag Hammarsjköld, who was Secretary General of the United Nations in the 1950s and 60s, used to climb mountains and he wrote about how a climber puts down physical markings, stone cairns, as he or she journeys up mountains covered in snow, so they would know their way back. He called his personal journal his Markings. As well as climbing the Swiss Alps he traversed his own inner landscape, writing out ‘his negotiations with God’. Every pilgrim in the spirit needs a marker. That’s what the cross is: a marker on our inner landscape, that reminds us of the importance of the God of the cross in our lives. There are many High Crosses, of all different sorts, in different places around Ireland, in townships, on the outskirts of towns, as well as in cemeteries. We still don’t really know why they were placed in some areas. But perhaps they too, performed this very same ‘marking’ role for the Celtic Christian pilgrims: solid reminders as to what they were on about. As they pilgrimed through strange towns, these crosses told them not only that the people in this town shared their same story, God’s story, but also reminded them of their own inner spiritual identity. STRETCHING OUT FROM CIRCLED CENTRE - EMBRACING This coming into our inner spiritual identity, takes me to my third point: the arms that stretch out to embrace in. I began this address with the words: ‘The image of the cross beckons us to move through suffering and find the fullness of life in the garden of resurrection and God’s compassion.’ If we are to learn to embrace life and others as truly as the Beatitudes, I believe, asks us to do then first we must learn the embrace of Christ within ourselves for each of us. This is about being very real in acknowledging our pain, our deeply wounded self, and having the courage to share this incredibly intimate self with Christ. In recognising Christ as a lover, in whatever way that speaks to you, comes the awareness that you are solitary, but not alone. With Christ, we are grounded in that dynamic affection of the Trinity. And it’s in this space that we can begin to see life differently. This is a space where we are remade, refashioned; it’s a space where we can begin to recognise that even death has no sting because it’s in the immortal space with God. Everything feels very fraught in my language here because I am touching upon mystery: when you die to suffering with Christ, in Love, you are awakened into a new ground in God. This is a visceral experience, that can’t be contained in language. This is a space we are called to die into every Easter. We still feel pain, brokenness, thirst for justice in the world, but we begin to move with this differently. There is a Welsh poem, dating around the 13th century, The Loves of Taliesin, which is over fifty lines in couplet form. Each first line of each couplet in this poem begins with the words ‘The beauty of,’ and each second line the words: ‘Beautiful too…’ Here are eight lines (Davies 283): The beauty of a companion who does not deny me his company,Beautiful too the drinking horn’s society.… The beauty of the sun clear in the sky, Beautiful too they who pay Adam’s debt.… The beauty of an eagle on the shore when tide is full, Beautiful too, the seagull’s playing.… The beauty of the word which the Trinity speaks, Beautiful too, doing penance for sin. For me, this is the resurrection - the ability to re-see the world through eyes of Love and now grounded in the Trinity. Nothing has changed, but the way you see it alters everything. God’s Love holds nothing back from anyone. God is the encircler. This is God’s embrace of us, from which we are then asked to embrace others. So, the arms of the cross: firstly, reaching out in self-giving, recognising how much we have been given; secondly, understanding our own humanity in this giving, the role of the spirit invites us into the future with hope, and; thirdly, the courage to be a people who embrace others, because of Christ’s first embrace of us. Recently we heard at St Peter’s Eastern Hill, the choir sing Arvo Pärt’s version of the Beatitudes. This piece of music builds up step by step in volume and intensity, as each line of the Beatitudes is sung. Finally, after the last line, the organ completely takes over and seems to splurge out music everywhere; a kind of anarchic spillage of Love into the world. Arvo Pärt has punctuated each sung line of the Beatitudes with two bars of silence. Rhys Arvidson, our organist at St Peter’s, showed me the music. After each half line, and line, there is a bar with a single breve sign: a whole bar of silence. And above these bars are the letters, just in case the conductor still hasn’t got the point, GP: Grand Pause. Everything stops here. And then continues. We are asked to hear the silence, as much as the sound. And as it steadily steps up and up, there’s a sense of refinement of the human spirit, until a firmament pours out. A little bit of this sense of the cross that Cath and I have wanted to share with you today. At the heart of the cross is God’s encircling centre, which is the inner ground we are called to pilgrim toward: whether in invoking God down to be amongst us, drawing up his presence with Jesus, or learning what it means to share in God’s spirit. Silence is packed out with God’s love. And we need again and again to remember that each of us is a climber with Jesus sitting on that quiet mountainside while he teaches. Listening to his words and learning to re-tune our own ears. Sources Adam, David. Fire of the North: The illustrated life of St Cuthbert, with photographs and drawing by Jean Freer. SPCK, 1993 Davies, Oliver. Celtic spirituality. (Classics of Western Spirituality) Paulist Press, 1999 De Waal, Esther. A world made whole : rediscovering the Celtic tradition. Fount, 1991 Heaney, Seamus. The spirit level. Faber and Faber, 1996 O’Donohue, John. To bless the space between us : a book of invocations and blessings. Doubleday, 2008 Peterson, Eugene. The message/remix : the Bible in contemporary language. NavPress, 2006 Williams, Rowan. God with us: SPCK, 2017

by Carol O'Connor Thinking about How Not the what, nor the when, nor even the where, takes us inside the spaces of ourselves we long to go, but always the mystery of how. For the how, born in love, is timeless, holding all ways together. In the back room of the brain’s anatomy, vision (they say), is derived, though sight is not seen there; but here is a deeper seeing which, through the heart’s golden centre, can become our own particular how of way. How is a sway, a curve, an alignment, a current, a swerve that somehow turns all compasses and sets the movement straight; a glimpse of God’s soft edges. How is a fish, bending agile smooth-silver through the water, is the bird’s supple-slip glide, flashing revelation of forgotten body sensation; how is nature taking us home into warm moist earth. How, can get us out alive; digging through rubble to rescue those trapped, or how we wear masks, orbit one another as delicate butterflies, though desire longs to cling, clutch, hold on for dear life. Language too, falls down with the when and the where, even the who eventually succumbs, unrestricted by myriad impressions, momentum ungoverned; but the how is speech that pierces our vision. The how, born in love, is timeless, taking us to the spaces of silent skies, loosening those devices of control, a kite dancing up high, its coloured ribbons signing a way forward. That gaze between us in kindness.