This address was given on 21st August 2018, based on David Adam's work: The Wonder of the Beyond, for the Spiritual Reading Group at the Carmelite Library, Middle Park. Three snippets from the writings of David Adam: Firstly, a… a lovely story in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of three Irishmen who landed in Cornwell after having crossed the sea in a boat made of hide and without oars. When they were asked in the presence of King Alfred of Wessex why they had come they replied, “We stole away because we wanted for the love of God to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where.” (A Desert in the Ocean by David Adam p17) Secondly: l (David Adam) used to travel by bus to Newcastle to see my future wife, Denise. On this journey the conductor used to say, “We are coming to the end of the journey, to the terminus, this is where you all get off.” There was a finality in his words, suggesting no one could go any further, and yet not one of us would stay in the terminus; the end of this journey was the beginning of another. The terminus itself often looked dull and a little frightening but no one would stay there. They would move on, in my case I looked forward with great anticipation…..Often Denise would meet me at the terminus. I then did not notice how dull and frightening it was, only her presence. (A Desert in the Ocean by David Adam p118) And this final piece is from the book The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry: ‘I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved anyone. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you, “I am busy with matters of consequence!” that makes him swell with pride.’ ‘But he is not a man - he is a mushroom!’ ‘A what?’ ‘A mushroom!’ (quoted in The Wonder of the Beyond by David Adam p136) “We stole away because we wanted for the love of God to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where.” When you recognise yourself as a pilgrim on the road, you understand that life is to be lived as an adventure. For David Adam, God is found at the heart of human life, and in the whole of creation, and this God is Love, and a Love that is deep, abundant, alive to the human senses and a Love which relishes adventure. Pilgrims who love God, possess something a little like the foolishness that takes over someone who is in love, that sense of being on the road for the very sake of being on the road. Their values are different from the more worldly values. They are not bound down by security; they recognise that they are held in God’s hand. For pilgrims, being alive to the world and attentive to the unknown is a recognition that wherever we go, God’s presence is always there before us, and with us. Therefore, fear becomes courage, hardship a deepening of compassion and the unknown is opportunity for growth into fullness of life. “We are coming to the end of the journey, to the terminus, this is where you all get off.” All endings, even the scary-looking ones like death, are new beginnings. There is no such thing as living in the terminus. They are markers or places of transition to new depths of understanding, or fresh worlds waiting to be discovered. They can be places we feel Something or Someone calling us to go to. They can also be times of uncomfortable uncertainty. David Adam’s writing will often point out images that are ordinary or from the natural world to help us see God’s Presence: the tides of the ocean, the new day, the moon and the stars. Like ebb tide, the terminus is the place where everything’s coming to an end. But actually it’s also the place where we ask - where do I go next? It’s a crossover point, an invitation to take a new direction. Creation has very real boundaries and end points - and though they may look frightening or absent of love, these are creative places. Glory is found at the edges. ‘He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved anyone. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you, “I am busy with matters of consequence!”’ What are the matters of consequence for us in our lives? For each one of us, in our ordinary day to day activities, with our families, with our work, with those people we meet on the street or nudge up close to yet so far away from in our cars - what is it that is most important? For David Adam it’s the very wonder of creation, the very seeing of the mystery: the beholding of a flower or tree or the ocean. To be alive is to recognise how connected we are to what’s around us. To be alive is to own our sensory experience and by that means then we understand that God doesn’t only meet us on a vertical plane, but a horizontal one as well. In this autobiography, The Wonder of Beyond, the reader gets the sense that that David Adam’s heightened and sensitive awareness of a God, who is Love, Creator and Sustainer of all life, goes right back into his early childhood. Although the name of God was rarely mentioned in his childhood growing up in his family in the 1940s in Alnwick, North East England, there was a very powerful sense of Love’s presence. His father was both compassionate and wise. The autobiography begins with David Adam telling of his father’s self-described ‘fortunate accident’: as a young man in the early 1930s, he accidentally cut off two fingers by means of a mechanical saw. He subsequently got the sack for not using the saw properly so took to the roads to find work. And this was how he met his wife, an English woman who was with a group of travellers. They hooked up, left the travellers and were married three days later in Inverness. They had ‘no money, no home, no possessions, no real prospects. But they had love, the beauty of the landscape, and youth on their side.’ (Wonder of Beyond p4) And though they struggled with poverty, losing their first children due to malnutrition, later his father used to say to David in relation to this accident: ‘You do not know how lucky you are to be here.’ (Wonder of Beyond p5) Over the years his father found employment as a labourer, and was kept out of the war and made a driver because this damaged hand. Though the family were continually looking out for the ‘ticky man’ whom they had to borrow money from, they were ‘lucky to be here’ because they had the natural world to enjoy, they had each other to love, and they discovered that this love made more things possible. David Adam’s father helped him experience a love that willingly sets free as welcomes back. When David Adam was 8 or 9 he wanted to leave home, his father relented and ‘with no harsh words only what seemed a willingness to let (him) go’ helped him pack his suitcase (with extra heavy things he subsequently believed later) and saw him on his way. David got to the end of the road struggling with the case, then sat on it and wept, hoping no-one would see. His father came down and kindly sat down beside him - ‘hello, you haven’t got very far, do you want to come home?’ And here, David Adam says, ‘I experienced the ability to walk out if I wanted to but also the loss in going. I was also made aware of the love that welcomed me back, that loved me though I had chosen to turn my back on it. Through a loving home I was learning the love of God.’ (Wonder of Beyond p10-12). For David Adam, as with the early Celtic Christian Church, the God of Love is made manifest in the Trinity. In The Cry of the Deer he writes: ‘We have a Creator who brings order out of chaos, a Saviour who offers life beyond the many deaths and hells of this world, a Spirit who breathes life into the inanimate; we should therefore be able to walk with a little more confidence. We should be the adventurers and explorers. We can live where people take the fullness of life seriously, and yet see that it is not a tragedy.’ (The Cry of the Deer p117. The Trinity is founded on relationship: the Father (or Mother, just as meaningful to the Celtic-Christians), the Son and the Spirit, and each of us is invited in a very real sense to participate in this relationship. David Adam’s father also encouraged him to use his eyes - ‘to look and take in what was around me.’ And through him ‘from an early I was discovering that life is to be adventured and that we cannot remain forever in a safe place.’ From their walks together ‘I discovered that every day brought something new to see or experience; no day is a repeat of the day that has gone before.’ (Wonder of Beyond p5-6) Christian pilgrims of the early Celtic church recognised three scriptures. The New Testament needs the Old Testament to be understood fully. But both Testaments need Primary Scripture. And Primary Scripture is our world. Creation has its own intrinsic teachings. Our relationship with our creation and her creatures informs our hard wiring from childhood. Without an ability to relate well with one another, to feel our connection with the earth, and have a desire for a relationship with God in our lives, we will not be able to begin to properly understand any scripture. For all of us, hard wired healthily in the world or not, seeking out and learning the teachings of Creation take a lifetime’s practice. Such Primary Scripture becomes the formation of our understanding about God. As a boy David Adam became keen to see everything his world at home had to offer. He requested a telescope and a microscope. Though the quality of these instruments was not very good because of cost, they did enable him to learn the importance of focusing in on things and looking closely over a period of time. In this process objects became subjects. What is in our world has form and place, and has a right to be here; just as each of us does. As a boy, home and its environs was a place of engagement. He didn’t need to go on holiday to Bali or Europe to find God or discover the wonders of creation. Where he was already was full of wonder. And when you read his books you sense how he is still graced with this perception today. Towards the end of Wonder of Beyond he writes: ‘The present is a gift to be opened yet most of us rush by to some future event without even noticing the wrappings. Enclosed in every moment in every encounter is the potential for wonder, for joy, for gift of the Presence. If only we would open our eyes and give our attention the world in which we live is capable of suddenly showing us that we live in a wonderful environment.’ (Wonder of Beyond p134) By paying attention we learn to love the earth; we recognise our dependence upon our environment and each other. And we grow in spiritual understanding. The presence of heaven on earth surrounds us in the here and now. “We stole away because we wanted for the love of God to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where.” In his book A Desert in the Ocean which is about the spiritual journey of St Brendan, David Adam goes so far as to say that ‘The Celtic pilgrim saw it was better to die in adventure than to remain fixed in a place where one was not fulfilled.’ (Desert in the Ocean p112) This is because to be on pilgrimage is to recognise you and others are on a lifetime’s journey of growth. To travel with this sense of ‘we care not where’ is not to be careless or irresponsible. In fact, it’s quite the reverse. ‘We care not where’ because our eyes are so full of care in being attuned to what we encounter around us in the here and now. We attend to what is real. And the love of God will always take us ‘back home’, that is, our centering anchor point within ourselves. Home is not out there; but within our very self. God is always bigger than we are - than our language, our thoughts, our actions. Learning to reopen our eyes to the adventure of life restores balance and wholeness, brings life givingness. This will not only help us overcome tragedy, but, David Adam quotes Paul Berger from A Rumour of Angels, ‘more importantly it will be an overcoming of triviality. In openness to the signals of the transcendence the true proportions of our experience are rediscovered. This is the comic relief of redemption; it makes it possible to laugh and play with a new fullness.’ (Wonder of Beyond p14) God accompanies us wherever we go; and, not only is God at our destination before us, but is in our remembering of past events. God too, is not only revealed by word of mouth in theology or the priest in the Christian Church, but by many writers and artists and musicians. God’s outpouring is expressed by a whole plethora of artistic expression, including the very living of a life. God is the first architect and artist. And as creatively engaged artists know, like the road itself, no true art can ever be owned or monopolised by one individual, incorporation or institution. As a teenager David Adam became a server in an Anglican Church. But what he seems to recall more vividly than time as a young man spent in church were the Sunday afternoons he spent alone at Hulne Abbey, built on the site of the first Carmelite monastery in England founded in the 13th century. ‘It was said that the monastery was founded on this site because the hill opposite looked like Mount Carmel.’ (Wonder of Beyond p8) The ruins of Hulne Abbey became his sacred place, his Holy Land. He attended the local grammar school but was much more prone to enjoy the ‘blackbird’ than the ‘blackboard’, ‘to listen to the song of the lark, rather than my teacher.’(Wonder of Beyond p18) He left school, by choice, just before completing his O Levels so he could bring in a wage for his family at the local colliery, in other words, down pit. When I taught literature for a few years at Fitzroy Community School with Faye Berryman, we would encourage the children to seek out the ‘turning points’ in the plot of a novel. These were paragraphs or moments when the direction of the plot would shift or change. This could happen unexpectedly and dramatically, or slowly and purposefully. Usually, in the novel, these turning points would be significant moments of change. Reading David Adam’s autobiography you become aware that for him, terminous moments are something akin to turning points. They can happen suddenly but also slowly in the midst of a busy active life. They are ‘nudges’ from the Spirit. As a young 16 year old he was happy with going to dances and pubs and friends, but also at this time there ‘was this nudging of my life in a certain direction and yet I cannot say why this should be. Something more than the words that were said, the space between the words often spoke louder. Something, Someone was calling…nothing definite. (Is it ever?).’ (Wonder of Beyond p28) And it came as some surprise even to himself, when after one all night shift in the mines and whilst having coffee with his father at a café in Alnwick, he blurted out: ‘I want to be a vicar.’ His father’s response: ‘You silly b-(ugger)! Go and get yourself some sleep and see if you can talk some sense.’ (Wonder of Beyond p29) His mother was more supportive and encouraging. At her instigation he spoke with his own vicar, who gently suggested he be confirmed and offered to teach him Latin. It was a visiting clergy friend who suggested, since David had no qualifications, he should apply to the SSM, the Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham. And here is the place where he received his training for priesthood. He attributes much of his formative spiritual understanding from Kelham: the need for taking time over his studies as well as the enjoyment of his own desires to be out in nature or playing soccer or fixing things in the boiler room; he learned a respect for time and experience - no student was ever allowed to preach until ordained; he came to understand the benefit of a disciplined rhythm of prayer in the day, and; most importantly the call to live lightly, ‘no one should have anything that he could not willingly lay aside.’ (Wonder of Beyond p63) Though his father always found the choice of his vocation ‘strange’, his mother was thrilled. Neither ever chided him for the loss of income. David Adam was ordained on Advent Sunday in 1959 at Durham Cathedral and sadly his mother didn’t live long enough to attend. His first curacy, sent by the SSM, was at St Helens, Auckland, County Durham. He had, by this stage already met his future wife, Denise who was studying religious education and soon after his ordination they married in Newcastle. His next parish was a large new housing estate in West Hartlepool; again it was a poor parish with a great deal of unemployment. It was particularly during his time in the mid-1960s at West Hartlepool where he came to see that ‘There is a danger of suggesting that God is more concerned about our church than he is about the world which he loves. We need to learn to show that God is concerned with, is present in, all of life. He is there when we travel to work, in the office, in the shop, when we are depressed or frustrated. He is present in our joys and celebrations. Even when we forget or ignore him he is still with us. Our faith is not a set of rules laid down but rather an entering into an exciting relationship with the living God who is with us at all times and in all places.’ (Wonder of Beyond p92) His work in a psychiatric hospital helped him see that when a person’s life is said to ‘break down’ what is really happening is that here they are ‘breaking through’; their lives are crying out to grow in a new direction. The terminus isn’t terminal. Once more, after 3 ½ years, trusting that felt sense of the spirit nudging them to launch out into the deep the young couple moved to the beautiful Northern York Moors and the parish of Ainthorpe. It was here that David Adam further developed his ‘recital prayer’ theology. He had recognised for a long time that reciting prayers, like mantras, helps our spiritual growth. As a young boy he had been taught hymns and songs at the Salvation Army and Baptist Church. He later joined an Anglican Church choir and began to learn that ‘songs, hymns and rhythmical prayers …. help to deepen our awareness and give us words to help us express what is in fact almost inexpressible. Prayers and hymns that have a rhythm or a beat are more easily remembered and not only help us to say something about our feelings and awareness but also deepen them.’ (Wonder of Beyond p16) Sensing that people needed prayers to say easily at home and at work he was inspired at Ainthorpe by the Carmina Gadelica (collection of prayers from the Celtic Christian Oral Tradition) and Poems From the Western Highlanders by G.R.D. McLean to experiment with writing his own prayers in the Celtic Christian tradition. One that he started then was the ‘Caim’ or the encircling prayer: ‘We are in God and God is in us’ or otherwise known as the Prayer of Seven Directions: ‘God before me, God behind me, God on my right, God on my left, God above me, God beneath me..’ and ‘only after we experience the greatness of God can we truly rejoice in the last direction that God is in us.’ (Wonder of Beyond p105) Together with practicing this ‘existential wonder’ at creation, recital prayers help us maintain focus on God even through those times in life that are very painful. David Adam emphasises our need when feeling desperately challenged by life to stay in the process, ‘don’t flit’ from tragedy. He encourages us to the search out for where we have a sense of God’s hand even during the most difficult times. Today, he says, many people seek to escape, ‘to avoid the issues, to tranquilise themselves with hyperactivity, science, religion or drugs. That is to retreat from the fullness of life - and that is a very sensible thing to do if there is no God!’ (Cry of Deer p177) But that we have a God, as God, Son and Spirit, means we always have this presence with us as we are called to face tragedy or pain or mundanities of life. We are not alone in facing the challenges. So there is no cause to escape ‘into a fantasy world where values and securities are of our own making.’ (Eye of the Eagle p139) For David Adam one of the biggest dangers in our lives ‘are the places where we do not experience anything at all.’ (Desert in the Ocean p101) There is a danger in our modern world because of constant media of having seen places before we get there, or of seeing the same shops when we arrive; travel itself can lose that edge of being called into something greater than we are. When we let go of the ability to see, when we lose that felt sense or glimpse of beauty and depth, and become seekers who are satisfied only with superficiality and quick fixes, then ‘life becomes more of a problem or we become dull and bored.’ (Desert in the Ocean p32) Being alive means there are times when we experience hardship; and these are times when we are called to ‘launch out into the deep’. We will be ‘disturbed out of our security and complacency…… called to adventure and risk so that we remain fully alive and sensitive to our world, the people in it and to our God.’ (Wonder of Beyond p91) After 23 years in Ainthorpe, although with something of an inkling that it was time to move on, the invitation to be Vicar of Lindisfarne, the Holy Island in 1989 was unexpected and came as a shock to him. His initial response was, ‘No, thank you.’ (Wonder of Beyond p114) But the nudging this time seemed to come as much from other people as that felt sense of the Spirit in himself. In reading about David Adam’s time as Vicar of Lindisfarne, the chapter entitled, ‘The Lord is Here’, there is a great sense that this period of his life just before retirement, was a as much about hyper-practical busyness as it was a culmination of a lifetime’s spiritual growth and maturity. It was a season of flourishing. The challenge of having to hold balance between managing busloads of visitors whilst maintaining a church of prayer and contemplation amidst the memory of the integrity of its former saints, together too with having to minister to his own small community living on the Island whilst looking after his own and his family’s needs, is only glimpsed. The daily rhythm of prayer and mass kept ‘some balance in this hyperactive existence.’ (Wonder of Beyond p 117) But it was an experience which he found enlivened the Church as well as enriched himself and the small Lindisfarne community. I want to finish with one passage, which for me summarises so much about the life and work of David Adam. His writing, (I’ve never met him), affirms, inspires and also makes me uncomfortable - or at least, never lets me settle into becoming too comfortable: In 1989 I was made a canon of York, in the minster that is on the site where Paulinus baptised Hilda and Edwin, where Chad was bishop and Wilfred built a stone church. It was here that Archbishop Theodore consecrated Cuthbert as bishop in front of King Egfrith on Easter Day in 685. Once again a ‘cloud of witness’ surrounded me. Here was the history of the Church in England all about me and I was a living part of it. No wonder I felt overawed when made ‘canon of York and prebend of Botevant’ and was led to my own stall within the minster. When I asked where Botevant was I was told that no one really know; it was probably on the coast somewhere and had fallen into the sea. I was likely made the prebend of a lost community of an area of land under the sea. Its very name Botevant probably meant ‘Bote’, that is ‘booty’ or ‘profit’ and ‘vant’ meaning ‘want’, so it was ‘of little profit.’ Perhaps this was reflected in my payment for being a canon: I was given a once-off payment of one bread bun! No one can say that the Church is not quaint at times or that it lacks a sense of humour. I took my bread bun home, baked it until it was hard and then varnished it. So I am still the proud possessor of a 20-year-old bread bun! (Wonder of the Beyond p 108) In my own life I am continually drawn to those places that make me feel safe or comfortable. A great part of my own heart is invested in my possessions, my income, my job. Possessions and money give me security. A job gives assuages my fear of a future that could be without a home or means for food. These promise me I won’t be homeless. If my job were less secure would I love it as much? If I had fewer possessions, would I be less happy? David Adam reminds me again and again, that ‘life is rich when it is not measured by what you own.’ He reminds me too, that in the movement away from the ‘possession’ of material things or desire for security, and more towards putting one’s faith in God and ‘entering more deeply the present moment and light of eternity’ (Wonder of Beyond p64), in this movement there is always the experience of that edge of loss. Deeply loving connections with our friends and families also will necessarily involve the bereavement of their passing. Or their bereavement in our own passing. Letting go and experiencing loss is part of life. We are none of us protected from it. The temptation for me, is either to attempt cheating at life and store up as many reserves as possible against the inevitable, or retreat from this deep and dangerous love. I am tempted to go into, what David Adam calls the ‘shadowland’ that place where we are timid and refuse to feel deeply. In other words, I am tempted to refuse to live. To live fully is to love deeply, and that means to experience the feeling of loss deeply. What we have loved, other people, our work and our possessions, will be lost and fall into the sea. But what I find so inspirational and encouraging about the wisdom in David Adam’s writing is that when we have that sense of right relationship in the world, which is formed by Primary Scripture then grown with in the Gospels and wisdom of Scripture - when we have this, then we are called to value and respect what possessions we have but also hold them lightly, to value and honour our work but not be defined by it. To intensely engage with and greatly love our friends and family and community and creation, is living out real life itself. The profound terror of loss becomes transformed when experienced in a loving relationship with God, Christ and Spirit at the centre of our lives. Here’s a relationship that to the world may look like nothing, but in which when I invest everything - even the brunt of my own periods of anger, pain and frustration - brings with it joy and hope and meaning. Entering into this relationship offers the very fullness of life itself. But if, like David Adam’s father, I lost two fingers due to an accident could I learn to see this loss as a ‘fortunate accident’? That’s a spiritual maturity shown by a man who rarely uttered the name God, but a maturity I can only glimpse, though feel inspired by. The meaning of the township of Provent falling into the sea for David Adam becomes a varnished bread bun symbolising hope. Loss connects all of us together at a much deeper more human and mortal level. It’s part of our having our daily bread. When we find ourselves are at the end of the rope, then we can begin to see God’s hand in all this. Loss can grow our capacity for empathy, hope and faith. It too can bring fullness of life and thereby choose to become pilgrims who steal away for the love of God, we care not where; in letting go we can begin to experience the gift of wonder in the world; and in loving God we begin to recognise that the terminus is not terminal. ‘All things pass away, but God alone is changeless.’ Teresa of Avila Carol O’Connor Carmelite Spiritual Reading Group Tuesday 21st August 2018 References Wonder of the Beyond by David Adam SPCK 2011 A Desert in the Ocean: The Spiritual Journey According to St Brendan the Navigator by David Adam Paulist Press 2000 The Cry of the Deer: Meditations on the Hymn of St Patrick Triangle 1994 The Eye of the Eagle: Meditations on the Hymn Be Thou My Vision by David Adam Triangle 1997 #Prayer #CelticChristianity #DavidAdam

Second of two addresses delivered Church of the Resurrection Mt Macedon, All Souls Day, 2019 The monks are to bear with patience the weaknesses of others, whether of body or behaviour. Let them strive with each other in obedience to each other. Let them not follow their own good, but the good of others. Let them be charitable towards each other with pure affection. (RB 72:5-8) I first encountered the Rule of St Benedict at the beginning of the 1990s when English historian and spiritual writer on the Rule, Esther de Waal, offered a 7 Day Benedictine Experience in Melbourne. We, a group of very disparate people from many walks of life, came together for 7 days and lived out the Rule in as faithful way as possible for a group of 20th century Christians, at the Santa Maria Convent, Northcote. In the 1970s, then married to the rector of Canterbury Cathedral, Esther de Waal lived on this site of a former Benedictine monastic settlement for many years. In Medieval times her house was the prior’s lodging. Outside her front door, daily she walked passed what once had been the granary, the bakehouse, the brewhouse. Further down were the ruins of the infirmary. The windows of the house itself viewed over the different parts of the monastery - the scriptorium, the pilgrim’s hostel. All was overshadowed by the great Cathedral. During these years, as a busy mother raising a family, tutoring at Open House University as well meeting with groups of people who constantly visit the Cathedral she began to think about those early communities who there hundreds of years ago. In Seeking God she writes about her own early encounter with The Rule: ‘sometimes one finds a place, a landscape, which is new and yet the forms, the shapes, the shadows seem already familiar. So it was for me with The Rule. It was neither remote, nor past, nor cerebral but immediate and relevant, speaking of things I already half knew or was struggling to make sense of….’ (Seeking God p12). In deciphering this world of the past, she began to make meaning from these clues all around her present life. She felt challenged to think about what shape the life of these monks might have looked like; she pondered about them as persons living in their own time. Slowly she let go thinking of them as simply faceless and amorphous, a past event with little relevance beyond sentimental history. And gradually she discovered some of the puzzles and paradoxes of her own life begin to make new sense. The clues left behind of their story, and especially as mediated through The Rule of St Benedict, gave her new a new value and insight into her own life. During that week at Santa Maria Convent, as we trod along our own Benedictine road, I felt touched, in a very small way, by something of the intention of The Rule which those early monks at Canterbury would have dedicated their whole lives to. And lives which, Esther de Waal reminded us, were ‘essentially unheroic.’ We too followed many of the monastic hours though not in the middle of the night, and we maintained the Great Silence (not speaking unless we had to, from about 8 pm after compline, til Terce at 9 am the next day). During some of these prayer times, Esther included short addresses and reflections on the life of Benedict, or the early Desert Fathers and Mothers. Over lunch, she read to us sections from Henri Nouwen’s, Genesee Diary. We spent time gardening in the afternoon, and at 4 pm each sat alone for lectio divina. Our life and our death is with our neighbour. If we win our brother (or sister) we win God. If we cause our brother (or sister) to stumble we have sinned against Christ, is a saying which comes from Antony the Great, one of the most influential of the Desert Fathers. (Silence and Honey Cakes, Rowan Williams, p23) The lives of these early hermits in the Egyptian Deserts were influential on Benedict and in turn helped form his understanding about how to shape a Christian community. We know most about St Benedict from his Rule. It is based on an earlier Rule of the Master, but a third in length. Benedict called it a little Rule for beginners, ‘mimimam inchoationis regulam’ designed to ‘set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.’ (RB Pro46). He understood community life in a down to earth, practical and very human way. But also, he was psychologically astute and sensitively attuned. He deciphered clues in his own world and re-shaped an existing Rule to form one much less austere, one which took into account the humanity, the differences as well as the temptations of all monks. He understood human foibles and fallibilities, the need to find a way in all these diverse human traits for a group of men to come together, to live, work and grow in the Love of God. The Rule of St Benedict differed from it’s predecessor not so much in how monks structure their day, but by the sort of communal culture St Benedict sought to foster. The Abbot now was thought of as a loving father, and the monastery itself compared to a workshop. Less hierarchal than the Rule of the Master, relationships between the monks were much more important for him. Mentoring was encouraged - older monks asked to move amongst the younger, to sit amongst them at table in the refectory. The instructions in the Rule itself offered a box of tools for the whole community, including the Abbot. In her subsequent work, Living with Contradiction, Esther de Waal writes about the vault of the nave at Canterbury Cathedral built in the Middle Ages: ‘Stand beneath that triumph of late Gothic building and you find pillar and arch, rib and vault, all brought together in one great harmonious unity, each separate and individual part linked both with the other elements and with the whole.’ (Living with Contradiction p40) Rowan Williams says that a person can only fully be a person when he or she recognises that they are part of ‘a network of relation.’ This involves an honest recognition and acknowledgement that we are all inter-dependent. ‘For the Christian believer that dependence is ultimately a dependence on ….a comprehending and comprehensive gaze. We are held in a look, a divine look, a divine contemplation of us; which leaving nothing out, judging and rejecting nothing of us, holds us. A comprehending - that is, an empathetic and interior awareness; a comprehensive - an inclusive vision of who we are.’ (see link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVx8dfMIR7k) This is our identity in Christ and this is the gaze of God, and God’s contemplation of the world God has made. This is also the gaze we are asked to hold one another in. 1 Our relationship in and with God always starts from the place of the heart. Where does the Rule of St Benedict start? The opening line of the Prologue : Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. The choice of the human sense that Rowan Williams employs for being in relationship with God, that of seeing, is here now one of hearing; the Divine Look which Williams alluded to, is here transposed to listening out for the Divine Word. For Benedict, our dependence on God is in hearing something of the Divine Word of God being said into the the heart. This hearing is both personal inclina aurem cordis tui - incline the ear of your heart, and relational - incline towards the magistri, (literally trainer or teacher). And the back story for both the monk reading or hearing the Rule, and the magistri, is their relationship in God. God holds all relationships; God coheres the world. Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. Here is a call to begin your spiritual journey wherever you are at. There is a story in the Desert Father tradition where Apa Pambo is asked about how to find salvation: ‘Find your heart’ he instructed, ‘and you will be saved.’ It’s in chapter 4:55 of The Rule St Benedict says: ‘listen readily to holy reading and devote yourself often to prayer.’ The heart space, guided by holy reading and prayer, and wisdom of those we turn to, is the beginning of all spiritual journeys. And it continues to remain so. For here we are brought into our ground with God. Here we receive, as well as speak into. The Rule encourages all monks, including the Abbot, to lean into God’s Divine Word speaking into each their hearts. As monks are accountable to the Abbot, so he and all considered themselves accountable to Christ. Christ moved amongst them. And the 3 vows which Benedictine monk’s still make today, set down an interplay for how a group of people, a network of close inter-dependencies, may strive to live under the roof of Christ in peace together: stability, obedience and conversatio morum (conversion of manners). They form the foundation for what it can mean to hear Christ amongst a community of individuals: stability is the recognition that each monk grounds his being and the others he is in close proximity with in the love of Christ; obedience is faithfulness to hearing Christ, becoming too a model and teacher for others; and conversatio morum, is that commitment to be in the place of the not yet. It’s a pledge to keep the heart open to change and growth. The space of the heart with a recognition of our interdependency and our dependency on God may be a good place to start. But what about those annoying habits of our fellows, those inner frustrations we experience, unfulfilled desires, grumblings that afflict anyone in community or family situation? St Benedict was very down on ‘murmurings of the heart.’ But from very early on in the Rule he gives us guidance to help us here. Underpinning our lives is the mercy and expansive heart of God. 2 Our hearts and minds need to remain open: our perception expansive and inclusive. A book of daily devotions I’ve enjoyed using is Of Martyrs, Monks and Mystics: A Yearly Meditational Read of Ancient Spiritual Wisdom. Here All Souls Day is given the subject heading: The Works of Mercy. Under this, The Joy of the Saints by St Augustine is quoted: ‘When we pray we are all beggars before God: we stand before the great householder bowed down ….hoping to be given something- and that something is God himself.’ And this is something St Benedict emphasised very early on in The Rule, ‘never lose hope of God’s mercy.’ In all our struggles with difference, with irritations, anger, impatience with one another, our sense of frustration at our own inadequacies and limitations, our arguments and disagreements, never lose hope in God’s mercy. Denise Levertov, in her poem, To Live in the Mercy of God (Collected Poems, pp 974-975) writes: ‘ …not mild, not temperate God’s love for the world. Vast flood of mercy Flung on resistance.’ Mercy is encounter with the expansive and inclusive heart of God; to touch mercy is to receive something of God’s heart. We are all invited to receive mercy. In his writing on St Benedict, Rowan Williams borrows a very beautiful phrase-image from a welsh poet: life is about ‘inhabiting a great hall between narrow walls.’(Holy Living, p 65). I hear by these words, a call to know life as lived in small spaces with wide views; to inhabit limited bodies with expansive hearts. And it’s in this learning to receive from God’s expansive and inclusive heart, that we can then extend ourselves in generosity to others. Being open and inclusive, also means finding ways for a disparate group of people rubbing shoulders with one another each day, to live together in a practical sense. And it’s here in the Rule, I think where obedience comes in. ‘The good of all concerned….may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and safeguard love.’ (RB:Pro47) In essence I hear this as a pledge to the love of Christ, through the Abbot, with the intention of establishing good practice on the part of each member in the community. And it’s this then that enables the good functioning of community life for all. We tend to treat the word obedience with suspicion - at best submission to another’s will with discretion, at worst being autocratically ruled over. But here in the Rule all these regulations, St Benedict insists, must be premised on mutual respect and love, in order for obedience to have any meaning. (RB 71) There are also several chapters outlining the Abbot’s own responsibilities and accountability, and the very clear directive to vary his teaching with the personal circumstances of each monk. (RB 2:23) The Rule itself is full of concessions. The particular needs and frailties of the monks are taken into account, even more as you read further into it. At Vigils (the night office) the opening Psalm 94 is to be said ‘slowly and deliberately’ (RB 43.4), with the implication that the community needs to give their bothers extended time to arrive. Benedict writes that for Sunday vigils, if ‘God forbid, the monks happen to arise too late…(then) the readings or responsories will have to be shortened.’ (RB 11.11) So, adjustments are written into The Rule, just in case the offices go a bit haywire. Implication being, they must have done so - and enough times to warrant putting it into the Rule. The timetables for meals and the amounts of food consumed at the table are regulated, with the expectation of these terms being met. But again then times and quantities of food, may vary seasonally and concession is given for more food during times of hard labour. (RB 39:6) Weekly kitchen service is mandatory, unless you are sick or otherwise engaged in important business. (RB 35.1) Those who are not strong are given help, and all kitchen servers are to be given extra portions of food and drink before they serve meals to their brothers so they should not be tempted to grumble. (RB 35.12-13) Chapter 40 of The Rule, is one of my favourites: ‘The Proper Amount of Drink,’ Benedict seems to all (but not quite) completely crumple before what seems even then the Italian cultural mores of daily imbibing wine. He writes: ’We read that monks should not drink wine at all - but since the monks of our day cannot be convinced of this, let us at least agree to drink moderately and not to excess.’ (RB 40.6) He then finishes the chapter by admonishing grumbling brothers in other monasteries where drinking wine is subject to tighter regulations, monks ‘there should bless God and not grumble. Above all else we admonish them to refrain from grumbling.’ (RB 40.9) So, this is a Rule which sets out a list of routines and instructions, but like all toolboxes the way in which the tools are handled and worked with is subject to each person’s character, stage of life and role in the monastery. 3 Place ourselves at the doorway between the invisible and the visible; attached detachment. Towards the end of The Rule, St Benedict spells out some of the different roles in the monastery. And there is one role, not often reflected on, but one which has me pondering. In chapter 66 he writes about The Porter of the Monastery. The actual Latin word is ‘ostiariis’, from which we get the word - ostiary. And an ostiary is the mouth of a river, but also more pertinent here, one who keeps the door, especially the door of a church. This role of the ‘porter’ is very specific. The doorway referred to here is the portal which stands between the ordered self sufficient world inside the monastery where ‘all necessary things such as water, mill, garden and various crafts may be within the enclosure’ and the much wider life outside which in Benedict’s time was unsettled, strife ridden 6th century Italy. The Porter is at the door ‘so that the monks may not be compelled to wander outside it, for that is not at all expedient for their souls.’ The doorway to the monastery is a powerful place to situate someone. Benedict tells us: Place there ‘a wise old man’ or ‘a sensible old man.’ A man who is mature and not himself tempted to wander off. He must also be a man of ‘fervent charity.’ He is to welcome strangers with a blessing. Visitors are to be given separate quarters, so as to avoid too much disturbance, but they are welcome to dine in the refectory but only at the Abbot’s table. As always, keenly understanding the requirements of the job, Benedict makes sure that the porter is to be provided with a room near the door, and perhaps a younger brother to help him out. In my first reflection with Evelyn Underhill I talked about cultivating that sense of attachment with detachment. At the doorway of the monastery, is placed a person with a highly developed sense of this practice. The role of the porter is to protect the inner environment of the monastery, but not overly stifle or ignore the influence of outside environs. Here is placed a seasoned soul who can greet each stranger with warmth, and also discernment. This prompts me to ask a more psychological question: what or who in me, do I place, do I choose to stand at my doorway; that interface or portal between my inner world and external environment - the visible and the invisible? What inner space are we each called to protect, yet at the same time not stifle to the point where we become invulnerable to the knocking call of the stranger outside? The Benedictine vow which I gravitate to and yet increasingly find the most challenging, is the one to undergo inner renewal -‘amendment of manners’, ‘fidelity to monastic life’, ‘conversion of life’: conversatio morum. (RB 58.17) It’s one which involves conversation: Oblate Catherine Haynes writes: ‘The monastic profession is a way of life which involves conversation, communication, between the monk and God, the monk and the abbot, the monk and other monks, the monk and the surrounding world, a conversation that is prayer or prayerful.’ (Oblate Catherine Mary Magdalene Haynes, Oblate O.S.B. https://www.idahomonks.org/sect805.htm) If I translate this into my own life, then here there is recognition that the practice of awareness in conversing is one I am asked to cultivate. Stay awake, consciously unselfconscious in my own conversation with others, with God, with Scripture. We need to keep the doors of our ears open and listening, but also give time to return to our inner room, our heart space, in which we each converse with Christ. This space inside us is a touchstone, a spring from which habits of the heart are are fashioned. Here is the place for new life. Equally so, if I leave it uncultivated or fill it up only with my own ego driven agendas, this inner place stultifies, at worst distorts towards me to coercive action. So, the porter is an image which speaks to us. Here is the call to be willing to embrace the unknown stranger, welcome in, greet with the blessing of Christ; but, also to hold back, protect the inner ground that has already been prepared over and precious. There’s a boundary between that which is self contained and self sufficient, has integrity; but not so fenced off from an openness that allows the foreigner, the itinerant, to offer change. This is not about becoming resilient or impervious to outside influence; but about being discerning, prepared to be vulnerable because that’s the place where Christ as shepherd also stands. And it’s the steadfast love of Christ who holds us there. This vow of ‘conversatio morum’ is a radical vow in our world today; it’s counter cultural because of its refusal to take sides. It consciously recognises that standing here in this tension between what you protect and what you let in requires wisdom, and potentially it is the place which can offer a community, as well as a person, deep inner growth. And this vow, like the two others, stability and obedience, at interplay in the heart, are grounded, made real in the ongoing life of prayer. 4 Move deeper into prayer life. Develop patterns or habits of the heart. This reflection finishes with an invitation for us all to enter into for a period of time (start with 15 minutes) what the Benedictines call lectio divina or Holy Reading. St Benedict wrote about the importance of this practice in Chapter 48. Beyond specifying its practice being important during the monk’s other daily activities, that it is called lectio which involves solitary reading of scripture and for which the younger monks may need supervision, he gives little direction. However, Benedictines since the founding of the Order have written extensively on this practice of Lectio Divina. ‘Let us enter into ourselves, Time Presses’ Brother Lawrence (1611-1691) Lectio Divina - Holy Reading: The word is not only external; it is implanted in our hearts James 1:21 One suggested way to practice Lectio Divina. Select a line or few lines - there’s no agenda here. The line can be from scripture or poetry. A line that touches your heart. Take yourself somewhere quiet and comfortable - this is time for receiving. At home perhaps light a candle. Focus on your breathing for a few moments. Be aware of where you are. Take time to settle. Read the words - aloud is good, but quiet if you like. Focus on only a few of the words e.g. ‘Listen with the ear of your heart.’ Read these words again. Perhaps a few times - befriend the words. Cherish them. Sit and ponder these words for 5-10 minutes, or longer if you like. Put down the paper upon which they are written. Allow thoughts and feelings to come and go, greeting them like friends, then moving on. Let you mind become a little like Hildegard’s feather on the breath of God. Let the words sit within you like a mantra. References The Rule of Benedict in English Liturgical Press, 1980 Seeking God: The Way of St Benedict by Esther de Waal Fount Paperbacks, 1984 Living With Contradiction: Reflections on the Rule of St Benedict By Esther de Waal Fount Paperbacks, 1989 Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert by Rowan Williams Lion Publishing, 2004 Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for Today By Rowan Williams Bloomsbury, 2017 Of Martyrs, Monks and Mystics: A Yearly Meditational Reader of Ancient Spiritual Wisdom Ed by Charles Ringma and Irene Alexander Wipe & Stock, 2015 The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov Ed and annotated by Paul A Lacey and Anne Dewey A New Directions Book, 2013

A paper delivered at the Carmelite Centre, Middlepark on Tuesday 21 June 2016, for the Spiritual Reading Group. If there’s an Ur-language still among us, hiding out like a pygmy pterodactyl in the woods, sighted at daybreak sometimes, perched on a telephone wire, or like prehistoric fish discovered in ocean’s deepest grottoes, then it’s the exclamation, universal whatever the sound, the triumphant, wondering, infant utterance, ‘This! This!’, showing and proffering the thing, anything, the affirmation before the naming. Robert Creely, American poet and close friend of Denise Levertov, has written: ‘The exceptional grace - a dancer’s I liked to think - of (Denise Levertov’s) work, the movement so particular to a complex of thought and feeling accomplished a rare unity. That unique quality is present in all she does…’ Each time I have felt myself getting stuck, or more frequently lost in writing this piece on Denise Levertov, I have returned to spend time with her poetry. There she continues to give me something fresh, wakes me up to the world a little more. And there too it’s as if, gently admonishing, she has sent me back into my floating thoughts, back to my blank screen, and pressed me forward on a track; wondering, enticed. It’s a good creaturely way to move with such a graceful poet dancer. Denise Levertov believed that her poetry was ‘testimonies of life lived.’ She called language ‘her Jerusalem.’ Her poetry was born out of her life. In all, she wrote 24 volumes of poetry, 4 volumes of essays and 8 translations. There is also a substantial body of correspondence and personal letters, diaries and notebooks. Her writing continued to be throughout her life piercing with insight, alive to her imagination and attentively wrought. As in her own lived life, her poetry and poetics evolved. Memories and apprehensions of life, like layers of soil being built up over time, became mixed with new understanding and insight. In this presentation I shall be looking at her later poetry for this very reason - in them can still be detected the early strata of her early work. Denise Levertov was born in England in 1923 and died in America in 1997. Her father, Paul Levertoff, was a Russian born Jew. He descended from Shneour Zalman, a Russian founding father of the Habad branch of Hasidism. When Paul converted to Christianity he was ostracised by his family, and chose to leave Russia after finishing University to make his own way in the world as a teacher and academic. Denise’s mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones, was Welsh born. She was orphaned at a young age and brought up by relatives who were strict Congregationalists. As an adult she travelled and then studied under Paul Levertoff’s supervision in Constantinople. They married in 1911 and moved to London. There, as Anglican priest, Paul Levertoff worked in a London Church of England Parish, but he was also the Director of the East London Centre for Jews and a member of the Hebrew Christian Church. Later, Levertov described them as ‘exotic birds in the plain English coppice of Ilford, Essex.’ She called her mother, who was a naturalist and artist, a ‘pointer outer’. Beatrice planted the seed for Levertov’s own call to ‘pay attention’ to all things, to movements and changes in the natural world. For Denise, this also translated to attentiveness to fine tunings within the self. And it’s a call she extends to us, as reader or listener of her poetry. The final poem in the last book of her poetry, (Sands of the Well 1996) published in her lifetime: Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes, caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng’s clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, O Lord, Creator, Hallowed One, You still hour by hour sustain it Although from a very young age Denise Levertov declared herself to be an agnostic, she nonetheless, celebrated ‘mystery’ and later attributed her keen sense of ‘wonder’ and ‘marvels’ to her own childhood education in Hasidism. Dana Greene in her comprehensive biography of Levertov writes: from a young age we see that Levertov ‘ discovered mystery in the divine sparks of the Hasidism and in her search for “inscape.”’ But it wasn’t only her Jewish heritage which had a lifelong influence on her writing about wonder. Greene goes on to say: ‘” The ‘negative capability” of Keats, the “disinterested intensity” of Rilke, the “dialogical relationships” of Buber, each brought her closer to its revelation……(the) search for mystery is everywhere in her poetry, but she claimed not to have belief. She considered herself a “syncretist or a dilettante of religions”.’There was a spirit in Denise Levertov from a very young age which sought expression through writing poetry, but refused to be contained. Words became Levertov’s primary and lifelong interest. At the end of her life she lamented that the English working vocabulary in America was shrinking. She herself wrote her first poem at the age of 5, dictating it to her older sister Olga. At the age of 11 she sent a poem to TS Eliot who was then Editor of The Criterion. Though he did not publish the poem, he took the time to write back to her and advised to keep writing poetry and translate of other poets. Rilke, was one of a number of poets she translated and went back to again and again for inspiration throughout her life. Levertov was mainly home schooled by her mother. Their house was filled with books. As she grew up increasingly she enjoyed solitary visits to London galleries and museums; places that become repositories to feed her awakening imagination. For a time as a young adult she pursued ballet, but then at 19 became a nurse. However, it was when she left England in 1948, aged 25, having married an American, Mitchell Goodman, that writing became her primary focus. The contemporary French phenomenologist, theologian and poet, Jean Louis Chretien, has written about interplay between the gaze, the speech and the silence. I have found the idea of this inter-movement, like a dance, a helpful way of working with Levertov’s poetry. It’s as if Levertov herself is performing a listening-gaze into silence. This act is with her whole self, her body, mind and spirit, and the action gives voice in words born from this. And once uttered, the words themselves seem to fall back into the unheard. According to Chretien, listening is prior to speaking, and ‘speaking does not dominate listening’, thus it provides a common space for community. So this act of listening-gaze into silence, is relational. Throughout her life a great deal of Levertov’s poetry celebrates the natural world. On one level you can read these poems as a celebration of nature and all its attendant nuances - exteriorily witnessed and inwardly apprehended. But when looked closer, what starts happening particularly in her later work, is even more delicately layered, more exceptionally nuanced. In her search to make meaning, there is a delicate balance and understanding between the poet as self-conscious perceiver perceiving, and that which is perceived being both perceived and also perceiving. The silence that rests in all of this, in the perceived and the perceiver, and the silence which enables the listening, precedes all. And this then is all then further mirrored in the world of the listener or reader - their interplay with the words, their gaze, their own listening. Last poem, published posthumously in This Great Unknowing: Aware When I opened the door I found the vine leaves speaking among themselves in abundant whispers. My presence made them hush their green breath, embarrassed, the way humans stand up, buttoning up their jackets, acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if the conversation had ended just before you arrived. I liked the glimpse I had, though, of their obscure gestures. I liked the sound of such private voices. Next time I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open the door by fractions, eavesdrop peacefully. For Chretien, silence, the unknown, is the ground of speech. And the first dimension of this silence is listening. ‘I opened the door / I found the vineleaves / speaking among themselves in abundant / whispers.’ Secondly, there is silence as response. Chretien says: ‘here the suspension of speech is still itself speech, an eloquent silence, a place of encounter and mutual presence.’ ‘My presence made them / hush their green breath.’ What do the plants do? They ‘button up their jackets, act as if they were leaving anyway’. Mutual encounter and response in silence. And thirdly, according to Chretien, speech as excess. Excess means ‘a surplus of content that defies our attempt at grasping it through our understanding.’ Speech becomes religious. It encounters the Divine. It becomes the Incarnate Word which redeems human silence and helps us listen for a Eucharistic excess in the cosmic silence. It leaves its traces in the ordinary, traces many of us have lost sight of, but still remain for those who are willing to ‘relearn the world.’ Here, for the poet: ‘Next time / I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open / the door by fractions, eavesdrop / peacefully.’ What is the poet wanting to hear? What does she think she will overhear in her eavesdropping? Is it such ‘excess’? We are left wondering too, what is it that we hear and do not hear in the world around us? This is a poem about the privileged articulated view of a listening-gaze into nature: ‘I liked the glimpse I had’, ‘I liked the sound’. And the poem itself becomes the explanation for its title, Aware. To be aware in the world is to be attuned to this interplay of gaze, silence and word. Attuned, and listening deeply. ​ From their outset in New York, Denise Levertov and Mitch Goodman moved in cultured circles - bohemian, literary, academic and activist. A year after their marriage their only child, Nikolai, was born. Over the next 15 years Levertov formed close ties with older poets in particular William Carlos Williams and H.D., and also The Black Mountain Poets, those of her own generation, Robert Creely and Robert Duncan. In 1955 she became an American citizen. But these were also very difficult years. There were marital and financial problems, frustrations with her own irrepressible passions. She felt trapped and was not only concerned about the health of her parents and sister, but also experienced difficulties with her son. Mitch suffered depression and setbacks with his own writing. They moved around and lived in Mexico for a period. Nonetheless by the end of 1955 Levertov had really begun to make inroads into the American poetry scene. Very quickly, and uniquely for a woman at this time, she was establishing a name for herself. And a decade later she had 5 more published books of poetry and was now benefitting from public readings, fellowships and teaching positions. ​ For her 31st birthday Mitch gave Denise a two volume set of Buber’s Tales of Hasidism. In it they were delighted to read about her ancestor, Shneour Zalman. The work itself resonated with her mystic heritage. Buber’s writing was influential in other ways. From early on Levertov apprehended in life a ‘double image’ : joy and wonder, fear and promise. Buber helped further her imagination understand the self’s engagement with the interior terrain and exterior world. Also, the self’s connection with another self, with God, with the Other. Later, Thomas Didymus, or doubting Thomas, became one New Testament figure which helped in terms of exploring her own awakening Christian faith alongside doubt. She was discovering a place where faith and doubt could co-exist in art, as in the self. Central to the work of Chretien is the notion that the relationship between God, human and the world, is a calling forth, and a need for response. For Chretien, silence ‘opens us, wounds us spiritually and bodily, and summons us.’ During the 1960s and 1970s Levertov became actively involved in working for values of human justice; with protest groups she struggled for peace and care of the earth. She worked tirelessly, with Mitch, on anti-Vietnam War campaigns, and they were leading speakers for nuclear disarmanent groups and the environmental movement. She was arrested several times. Her poetry during this period reflects her social and political activism. Such public activism was not new to her. As a child her family had sheltered refugees. With her parents Levertov had publicly demonstrated against fascism. She had wanted to join the British communist party but was too young, resigning herself instead to simply selling The Daily Worker. But Levertov’s social activist spirit in the late 1960s and 1970s began to burn her out: ‘There is a cataract filming over / my inner eyes’ she writes in her poem Advent 1966. She felt as if a ‘monstrous insect / has entered my head.’ She had to Relearn the Alphabet. She recognised that her poetic space, writing and teaching, had to be her primary journey, not social activism. She also recognised that for her poetry was a craft and had a prophetic dimension, but it was not therapy or confessional. Amusingly in 1978 she said: ‘A poem is not vomit!...It is something very different from bodily purge.’ Poetry was organic, coming out of lived experience, which carefully uses shape and form, line break, rhythm, punctuation, indentation to articulate this intense experience like melody to the reader. The poet has an inner voice which seeks to articulate something pre-verbally intuited. This something is deeply personal which seeks to meet the personal in another. It is born ‘in the presence of a god.’ Levertov understood herself as ‘by nature, heritage and as an artist, forever a stranger and pilgrim.’ She understood herself as an ‘air plant,’ rootless, wandering, whilst remaining true to that instinct within herself to press on. In some ways she could never let anything go. She explored memories, kept a dream diary, reflected on her friendships. Accumulating knowledge, experience and understanding she would then seek to distil this into language. But by the mid-1970s her engagements with Anti-Vietnam War efforts had ceased with the end of the War, she finally broke off her marriage to Mitchell Goodman, and disconnected herself from Robert Duncan. During the years 1979-1982, Levertov wrote the long poem entitled: A Mass for the Day of St Thomas Didymus. The process of writing this poem she described as a conversion process. As with other poems written during this period, including El Salvador: Requiem and Celebration, such poems became vehicles through which she was able to wrestle with spiritual and theological issues. She now talked about poems which ‘enfaith’, in other words help birth faith in God. But conversion to Catholicism came slowly for her. Later she also attributed her conversion to the figures of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and Oscar Romero. And before deciding on Catholicism she visited many churches, Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic in Boston and London. ​ The poem The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velazquez) is based on a 17th painting, 'The Kitchen Maid' or 'La Mulata' in Spanish, by Velazquez in 17th century. A mulata is a woman of mixed race. The word itself actually comes from the Spanish, la mula, which means ‘mule.’ Levertov would have been aware, there are two versions of this painting. One on display in Dublin, the one which Levertov had seen on a visit, and one in Chicago. In a 1933 cleaning of the Dublin painting, a depiction of the supper with Jesus at Emmaus was revealed. So before we even read this poem it’s of note that the painting itself is contextualised within two ideas of great interest to Levertov - the double: one painting has the Emmaus scene, the other doesn’t, and; the uncovering of the hidden, the not-seen becoming revealed. The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velazquez) She listens, listens, holding her breath. Surely that voice is his - the one who had looked at her, once, across the crowd, as no one had ever looked? Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her? Surely those hands were his, taking the platter of bread from hers just now? Hands he’d laid on the dying and made them well? Surely that face-? The man they’d crucified for sedition and blasphemy. The man whose body disappeared from its tomb. The man it was rumoured now some women had seen this morning, alive? Those who brought this stranger home to their table don’t recognize yet with whom they sit. But she in the kitchen, absently touching thewinejug she’s to take in, a young Black servant intently listening, swings round and sees the light around him and is sure. The poem itself refers to the story in Luke after the death of Jesus when Cleopas and another unnamed person are pondering recent events as they walk along the road of Emmaus. They meet Jesus who helps them understand the revelation of scripture more deeply, but they do not recognise him. They invite this stranger home for dinner and it is only at the end of this meal when he departs that they recognise him as Jesus. Levertov’s poem, like Velazquez’ painting, draws on two main themes in the Gospel story: the recognition of Jesus, and Jesus’ affirmation and inclusivity of the outsider. The scene painted by Velazquez is of a mulata slave whose body position is turned away from Jesus as she makes bread in an adjacent room. But her head is slightly turned towards him; she is overhearing his conversation, listening to ‘that voice’. Is this the man who had looked at the mixed raced servant, ‘once, across the crowd, / as no one had ever looked’? Chretien says that listening is a ‘truly palpitating activity, it can happen only with this heart that beats, this air breathed in and breathed out, this patient activity of the entire body. It is with all one’s body that one listens…The always unfinished truth of listening is a heartfelt truth.’ In order to truly identify Jesus, the servant girl has to hear the silence within herself to then verify the voice of someone who once ‘looked at her across the crowd’, who had ‘seen’ her. This is a seeing that is both interior as well as exterior. It’s happening within Jesus, and within the servant-girl. It’s the very memory of the sound of Jesus’ voice that recognises and affirms her. She remembers his past recognition of her own selfhood being shown to be worthy. In both instances he doesn’t even need to say her name and he doesn't even need to speak with words to her. But she holds back her breath, can’t let go of it until she is sure that it is him. She is in a gap space between heartbeats. Like Doubting Thomas she needs more evidence. And it is only she alone who can take that final bodily action to turn around and see. To answer this call, she must risk all. She: swings round and sees the light around him and is sure That Jesus has already recognised the mulata and his hosts, from the very start, is assumed by the poet. Here again we have listening-gaze: a perceiver perceiving, and the perceived - Jesus -is also perceiver. Jesus is recognised in the poem as the recogniser of all; though he sits with those who are still blind to the truth of his identity. His table is a Eucharistic gathering. The whole poem, like the painting, is centralised and sacramentalised in him. And, in both poem and painting, the Eucharist is at its centre, yet placed off-centre stage. This is a Jesus who seems to be in the background, but actually is drawing everyone, including the reader or viewer, to Him, and to God. Both poem and painting are titled The Servant Girl, but everything is actually directed toward Jesus. He invites inclusion and identity for everyone, including the servant girl at a much greater feast, the Eucharist. At the end of the poem, though she is still doubly excluded from society - by her class, and her race - through the risen Christ she is given recognition, affirmation and belonging in the kingdom of God. Levertov wrote this poem in 1987. She herself is that servant girl at Emmaus. Her past and present are depicted there. She described herself as a ‘mongrel’. Before she could dare to swing round, look at the Christ squarely, she had to find the courage to ‘risk all’. She was becoming much more attuned to this newly transformed, yet ever ancient, inner voice she had always heard and trusted, but never quite in this way before. Though she had always known that the visible and the invisible, and the audible and inaudible are not rigidly separated, she was coming to understand the nature of excess that is poured out from the silence. However, right up until her death in 1997 Levertov remained adamant in the distinction that she was a poet who was a mystic, not a mystic who was a poet. As Dana Green puts it, for her: ‘Mystic and artist were singular ways of being and distinctive vocations.’ But the distinction was becoming very blurred. ​ Levertov’s concern for social justice issues remained strong throughout her life. Invited to give a Pentecost sermon on Peace at the Cathedral Church of St Paul in Boston in 1988 she said: ‘If we neglect our inner lives, we destroy the sources of fruitful outer action. But if we do not act, our inner lives become mere monuments to egotism.’ In the 1980s she not only recognised poetry as her primary means for expressing social concerns but it is that space whereby the attunement of one’s whole self enables one to became more alive than ever. And as a pilgrim, she felt ever called to pressing out past the boundaries of self and journeying onwards into the unknown. In 1982 Levertov took up a teaching position at Stanford University, which became the Institution she ultimately sold all her correspondence and journals to and which house them still today. Although finally settling in Seattle, she continued to write poetry, read widely, ask questions, give talks, teach, and reflect on the craft of poetry in her journals, letters and books. In doing this she was also able to cover her own costs and look after the financial needs of her adult son, Nikolai, who at 33 was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Right up to her death in 1997, she was awarded honours and prizes. In these last 15 years of her life she became engaged with works such as The Cloud of Unknowing, and wrestled with the ideas of people such as Benedicta Ward, Anthony Bloom, Basil Pennington. Murray Bodo, the Franciscan father, became a spiritual mentor who advised and helped her in particular with her challenges with Nikolai. She worked with the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola with Lee Dapfer as her director. For ‘temperamental’ and ‘ideological’ reasons, she chose not to have a spiritual director, but Julian of Norwich became a nominal one. Impatient and irritable, by her own admission, Levertov had alienated many people in her life. However, as Dana Green comments: ‘The late 1980s were for Levertov a time of making peace and reconciling. Through imagination she restored a relationship with persons in the past and forged a link between her vocation as poet and Christian. The result was greater personal tranquillity and a desire to ‘clear the decks’ and risk a new beginning.’ As her own self was being transformed during the last 15 years of her life, immeasurable reconciliations began to place - with Mitch, with the memories of Robert Duncan and her family, with Adrienne Rich, and increasingly with Nikolai. Visitation. Overflow. 1 The slender evidence…… The you must take my word for it. The intake of a word. Its taste, cloud in the mouth. The presence, invisible, impalpable, air to outstretched arms, but voiced, tracked easily in room’s geography, among the maps, the gazing-window, door, fire, all in place, internal space immutable. The slenderness of evidence,narrow backed tapir undulating away on rainforest paths, eachtapir bearing a human soul. 2 Amazon basin, filling, overflowing spirits in every plant, in bark, in every animal, in juice of bark. Words taken by lips, tongue, teeth, throat, down into body’s caverns, toenter blood, bone, breath, as here: as here the presence next to that window, appearance known not to sight, to touch, but to hearing, yes, and yet appearing, apprehended in form, in color, by some sense unnamed, 3 moving slenderly doorwards, assured, re- assuring, leaving a trace, of certainty, promise broader than slender tapir’s disappearing sturdy back, the you can only take my word for it, a life, a phase, beyond the known geography, beyond familiar inward, outward, outward, inward. A ‘time and place’ (other terms unavailing) of learning, of casting off of dross, as when hunters steam off fur, skin, feathers in cauldrons, leaving the flesh to share with all, the humble feast, slender evidence, take it or leave it, I give you my word. Visitation. Overflow. was published posthumously, in the volume: This Great Unknowing. There are different ways to move with this poem. Words here are ingested, ‘taste, cloud in the mouth’. They are a visceral experience, but also ‘tracked easily / in a room’s geography’. They are heard and apprehended ‘by some sense unnamed.’ Words travel to become, ‘flesh to share with all’. This ‘humble / feast’ is a Eucharistic image. And it’s a feast centered on and flowing from the word / Word. The overflow that is born in the silence of the body helps us listen for Eucharistic excess born in the cosmic silence. It’s as if, by implication of the two full stops after each word, Visitation. Overflow. that the poem has two titles. They are two distinct happenings. By this, is Levertov trying to articulate something witnessed as being given and received from a place of unknowing that then is able to pour itself out? Or, does the gift itself continue to be given, feasted on, an overflowing? Here the Visitation and the overflow are one in the present moment, and go on endlessly in the poetic craft and the act of creation itself. When Christians hear the word ‘Visitation’, they think of Mary, who after being visited at the Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel and pregnant with Jesus, went to see her pregnant cousin, Elizabeth. Through the recognition of the Christ Child by John, Elizabeth's unborn son, they are both filled with Divine Grace. In this poem the Incarnate Word is enfleshed within the self and it gives birth to poetic utterance. Its journey is like that of a ‘narrow backed / tapir undulating / away on / rainbow paths, each tapir bearing / a human soul.’ When I looked up ‘tapir’ I found that this animal is known as a peaceful wanderer, an endangered species, a shy hermit, a gentle, custodian of the forest, an animal that travels well-worn trails from dense undergrowth, a negotiator of forest paths. It’s journey in this poem is likened to ‘as when’: hunters steam off fur, skin, feathers in cauldrons, leaving the flesh to share with all, the humble feast, slender evidence, take it or leave it. I give you my word. The inner tapir is a creaturely spirit that walks through dense forest trails of self to find language, to then share with others. This is a poem as much about the birth of poetry as the birth of faith itself, within the body. The experience of this birth can only be known via taking the journey itself. The process can only be attested to with ‘slender evidence’ but is backed by the poet’s word. The Visitation is the bearing witness to this enfleshed word; the recognition that this process is dipped in the Divine. The Overflow is its consequent abundant and continuing lifegivingness. ​ In the last 10 years of her life Levertov had entered a place of much largesse of heart and word. The double image increasingly needed to break open. It is still there - Sojourns in a Parallel World, Writer and Reader. But it seeks break out into a ‘great choir’ or harmonies that combine to ‘make / waves and ripples of music’s ocean’. Levertov continued to struggle with many theological ideas: free will and a suffering world being primary preoccupations. She wrestled as well with the Catholic Church and its teachings, particularly birth control and abortion. But it was also a period where fiercely radical re-facing and re-visioning of her own life took place. As she asked hard intellectual and spiritual questions, she began to find answers in her own poetic space. It was a time whereby many threads of her life integrated and a new wholeness of self emerged. Her striving to love God became a slow recognition that in reality she was actually being offered God’s immense love for her. Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, Introduction by Eaven Boland, A New Directions Book, 2013 Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life, by Dana Greene, University of Illinois Press, 2012 Forrest Clingerman, Book Profile JCRT 6.1 December 2004: Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art by Jean-Louis Chretien, Translated by Stephen E Lewis Fordham University Press, 2003, & The Ark of Speech by Jean-Louis Chretien, Translated by Andrew Brown. Routledge 2004 PDF : www.jcrt.org>archives>clingerman

A paper published in The Melbourne Anglican (TMA, October 2016, No 552, pp 23-24). Christina Rossetti was dedicated to exploring and understanding God through her poetry. Writer, teacher and bookshop manager, Carol O'Connor reflects on how Rosetti has helped her on her own spiritual path. If love is not worth loving, then life is not worth living, Nor aught is worth remembering but well forgot; For store is not worth storing and gifts are not worth giving, If love is not . . . Christina Rossetti When Bp Stephen Cottrell was in Melbourne last year, he urged the clergy to consider their vocation as being a sentinel for God in the world. Such words are relevant for all Christians. Sentinels in the Bible are often those figures who see themselves as watchers of God’s movement in the world. They stand at a post in order to protect what they perceive is important. At night, they walk around the walls of the city. They remain awake, alert and watch. Primarily they take on the role as witness. The word ‘sentinel’ comes from the Latin: sentire - to perceive. Many philosophers and theologians have written on the topic of what it means to be a witness. The 20th century French philosopher Paul Ricoeur believed that a true and faithful witness is not an exact or even scrupulous narrator, but someone who has a passion, ‘personal devotion’ to the truth. He or she is more than a reporter. He or she testifies to something that personally concerns their commitment to truth. In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago. Christina Rossetti’s poem A Christmas Carol sets the birth of Jesus in a stable in wintry Victorian England. It is a familiar poem to many people. Here the reign of Christ is not set in any singular geographical place or time: Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him Nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away When He comes to reign… And the birth of Christ is seen as relational, deeply personal: Yet what can I give Him, Give Him my heart. Christina Rossetti is one of the finest women poets in the 19th century. She was born in 1830 and grew up in London. I have come to read her poetry in terms of one woman’s commitment to articulate an inner relationship with God. For her, the giving over of your heart was a central truth in one’s relationship with God. As Rowan Williams reminds us, ‘The Promise of God is not an idea; the Promise of God is the vitality of prayer and the transformed life that the Spirit gives….’ Rossetti’s life became a pledge to be in and write from this transformed life of prayer in the Spirit. Remaining resolute and purposeful in her commitment to God, she was also vulnerable, overly self-scrupulous, and found herself full of inner contradictions. Rebellious, passionate, imaginative, her prayers and personal devotions bear witness to an intense inner struggle, as well as joyfulness at being alive in God. Although possessing a confident and audacious inner spirit she nonetheless watched out for God in emotionally hard places within herself. She protected her privacy but she did not always recognise her own fragility. Throughout her life she was moved to go back again and again to find moral and spiritual lessons in nature. The more I read and delve into the vast breadth of her poetry, the more relatable I find her as a person. And the more I learn from her about God’s heart-beating presence in my own life, amongst the people I move alongside every day, and in our world. Christina’s father, Gabriele, was a refugee. He was a great lover and teacher of the poet Dante. He brought the family up with a zeal for the arts and literature. Christina and her siblings (Maria, William and Dante) enjoyed many evenings at home being entertained by other Italian refugees. Poets and musicians, such as Paganini, often joined the family. Gabriele taught Italian at King’s College London. When Italian started going out of fashion with the onset of Prince Albert’s German influence, Gabriele’s work was cut back so he became home tutor. But gradually went blind. Christina’s mother, Frances, though of Italian origin on her father’s side, was English. She was well educated and in turn, educated both Christina and Maria. Frances was the one who, both emotionally and practically, held the family together. When Christina was a teenager the family fell on hard times; William began to support them. Later, Christina with her mother and Maria, made several attempts to start schools but were never successful for long. Dante Gabriel (DG) Rossetti was an artist, and needed money to be supported through school. (Wealthy great aunt Charlotte sometimes stepped in and helped him out of his financial messes). In the late 1840s Dante started the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood movement (of which Christina is a nominal female member), and he later worked with William Morris and the artisan workshops. It was a very close family. Their relationships were complex, at times conflicted, but there always remained strong ties of affection between them. Gabriele was strongly anti-Papal. This suited Frances who took the children to Church of England parishes and eventually they attended Christ Church Albany St where Dodsworth was the Vicar and Pusey was connected. This was a parish that was greatly influenced by the Oxford Movement. In their teens, both William and Dante stopped going to church. William became a ‘free thinker’ - not quite our 21st atheist, but a little like; Dante continued to be fond of the church but only for aesthetic reasons. In 1860, Christina and Maria became Associates to the All Saints Sisterhood, Marylebone; Maria became professed nun of the All Saints’ Community in 1873. Christina continued all religious observances including confession right up until her death. The Anglo-Catholic milieu influenced the nature of her poetry. Many poems express her strong faith in the sacramental and holy. And a number pay tribute to Festival Days and the Saints. Though incredibly shy in her disposition, in later life she became actively involved in many social justice issues: the plight of women in workhouses, working to stop the practice of child prostitution and the anti-vivisection movement. However, she could never quite come around to the cause of the suffragettes. Christina Rossetti was a woman with a strong intellect. She was not diverse in her reading, but a deep and profound reader of the Bible, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Dante. By choice, albeit reluctantly, she remained single; the two men she wanted to marry during her life were Catholic and she couldn’t countenance this. It was a very painful choice. She chose to stay at home and look after her two elderly aunts, and her mother - writing her the many valentine poems that she could have well-written others. Amongst her spiritual confessors were the Revd Burrows - who became a close friend and someone with whom she could share the love of poetry, and a certain Revd Gutch who was not such a healthy influence in terms of his severe and austere teachings of God. Her own health was always fragile. There are ‘hidden periods’ in her life, gaps seemingly due to psychological or emotional stress. Christina herself refers to at least one ‘serious crisis.’ In the 1870s, she battled Graves disease, which left her disfigured, but it was breast cancer that she died of in 1894. I am fascinated by this educated family with a passionate love of the arts. How do you move in a world that is highly conventional and yet remain true to your inner spirit? The children grew up in the Victorian Era with all its attendant proprieties and moral strictures, but the family sought to make its way on its own terms. The whole family loved animals and at one point Dante kept a small zoo in his back garden in London, including a few wombats. They strike me as a family that always moved at a slightly angular course with what it meant to be English. They fitted, but never quite. And so it is with Rossetti’s poetry. It meets all the classical requirements of metre and convention, but it is as if her mind and her human senses are pledged to a central unfolding of something other within herself. Her language, though clever and witty, is full of play with logic, riddled with word games, artless and self-effacing in its tone but deadly serious in its commitment to truth. So who is God for Rossetti? How is she trying to use language in order to express her understanding of God? Her poetry pivots on the need to find the essence of something. Even colours are examined. ‘What is Pink?’ she asks in one poem in Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book 1872. The movements of nature itself are also often extensively studied: What are you telling, Variable Wind-tone? But all the time, Rossetti can only come back to the nature of the thing itself: What is orange? why, an orange, Just an orange! Though impenetrable, the thing itself, or nature, does not exist alone but relationally. This is where true meaning is found. Relationally, with and in God. In 1881, Rossetti wrote a sequence of 28 Sonnets: Later Life - a Double Sonnet of Sonnets. Here she sets out in poetry a breadth and depth of spiritual understanding and theological insight that is remarkable. Just in the first seven sonnets, we have several shifts of perception. The first sonnet begins with creation: God has the status of the eternal transcendent, the brilliant Maker of the world. Also, here is the stern authoritarian 19th century Victorian England image of God. The monosyllabic words (smite, rod, wrath, flames) evoke an exacting, pre-determining and patriarchal authority: Before the mountains were brought forth, before Earth and the world were made, then God was God: And God will still be God, when flames shall roar Round earth and heaven dissolving at His nod: And this God is our God, even while His rod Of righteous wrath falls on us smiting sore… However, in the very first word of the third sonnet, Christina Rossetti addresses God directly: Thou. For the first time a personal relationship with God is acknowledged. God, for all His smiting and slaying in the first sonnet, is not quite so removed as we may think: Thou Who didst make and knowest whereof we are made, Oh bear in mind our dust and nothingness, Our wordless tearless dumbness of distress. Well, not quite ‘dumbness.’ Rossetti has another 24 sonnets to go, but the tone in this sonnet countenances the tone in the first. We have shifted from a God of majesty and distance, to one who is now personable. We are shown here that we can directly address God. And it’s not because God was once in a bad mood, and now is in a good mood. He is personable because he made us and because of redemption through Christ: ‘thou who didst die our death and fill our grave.’ This is a God who is attuned to human suffering, and we can appeal to Him: ‘Comfort us, save us, leave us not alone.’ And we can even remind Him, Who has had experience of it in Christ, about the actual essence of what it means to be human and to be of His creation: ‘remember Thou whereof we are made.’ For Rossetti, we may be dust and nothingness, but we can be called to be very bold in our nothingness, to the point of reminding God about it. As with figures such as Teresa of Avila, Rossetti intuits she is given room in her spiritual relationship with her Lord, to be audacious. Though demure and self-effacing, she is often nonetheless forthright. And though she suffers, it’s never a servile relationship she has with God. She is able to represent her suffering as one who witnesses the self in suffering, not wholly identifies with it. She knows that there has to be something else at work. Her audacity comes out of a striving to see clearly. From Sonnet 5: Lord, Thou Thyself art Love and only Thou; Yet I who am not love would fain love Thee; But Thou alone being Love canst furnish me With that same love my heart is craving now. Allow my plea! for if Thou disallow, No second fountain can I find but Thee; No second hope or help is left to me, No second anything, but only Thou. O Love accept, according my request; O Love exhaust, fulfilling my desire: Uphold me with the strength that cannot tire, Nerve me to labour till Thou bidst me rest, Kindle my fire from Thine unkindled fire, And charm the willing heart from out my breast. Now, in this sonnet, five times within the first four lines the word Love, both capitalised and small, is used in relation to God. Here we have a God in whose relationship there can be ‘no second fountain’, indeed ‘no second anything.’ She appeals to this Love to ‘exhaust’ and ‘fulfil’ her desire, and finally ‘charm the willing heart from out my breast.’ Like what? Within the first five sonnets of this sequence, God has gone from being one whose ‘righteous wrath falls on us smiting sore’ in the first, to subsequently One in the third sonnet whom we can question with recognition that although we are nothing we still have at least human dignity, and now in the fifth to One who is recognised as a rapture of Love, of Spirit - for which ‘my heart is craving now’. These sonnets show a slippery, contradictory notion of God. Well, is it slippery - or Trinitarian? Or is it like all our relationships as human beings, complicated, messy and sometimes very painful. Later, in Sonnet 7 she writes: Love is the goal, love is the way we wend, Love is our parallel unending line Whose only perfect parallel is Christ, Beginning not begun, End without end. As a friend likes to remind me, only God is good, because only God is perfect. Here the only perfect parallel of God is in Christ. And Christ is Love. Reading Christina Rossetti’s poetry takes us through a wide range of complicated feelings and contradictions about how human life can be lived in God. There is a great commotion of feeling going on inside her. (Is it any surprise that at the end of her life she chose to write a commentary on the Book of Revelation?) It’s as if she tries to hold together inside herself everything that she has experienced. But what is it that holds it all together, that ultimately enables her to hold herself together? She sifts and sorts. It comes through - again and again - gently, quietly, when the shadows fall away and the dross is let go. The underlying presence in her poetry is that recognition that God is Love. Here, tucked away in The Face of the Deep: a Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse, is this: Love alone the worthy law of love: All other laws have pre-supposed a taint: Love is the law from kindled saint to saint, From lamb to lamb, from tender dove to dove. Love is the motive of all things that move Harmonious by free will without constraint: Love learns and teaches: love shall man acquaint With all he lacks, which all his lack is love. Because Love is the fountain, I discern The stream as love: for what but love should flow From fountain Love? not bitter from the sweet! I ignorant, have I laid claim to know? Oh teach me, Love, such knowledge as is meet For one to know who is fain to love and learn. Though proclaiming herself still being in ignorance, she yet contradicts herself and professes to a part that does know what the motive is of ‘all things that move’: Love. It’s love that both teaches, and learns. It’s the fountain and the stream. Rossetti has especially helped me on my own spiritual path with regards to an understanding of silence. It is only ultimately, in the places of silence and the unsaid, that the revelation of God dwells. In her poem Golden Silences there are two forms of silence: the inward one of worldly suffering, and the unknown one of death. But there is also the ‘sowing day’ where there shall be the obverse, the delighted ‘shout’ after all when all ‘silences vanish away’. And after death, there is the promise of our ‘shout in his delight’ for ‘whoso reaps the ripened corn.’ In another poem, Hope Carol, Rossetti longs to see what she can at this time only hear. And what she longs to hear is not found in the obvious, day or night, of this world. She knows though that she has to keep herself present to and witnessing of, this in-between space. For it is only here that a person can be attuned to God’s revelation. This longing to see and hear will be fulfilled. But will happen only in God’s time, not Christina Rossetti’s time. God’s time, not in our time. In Golden Silences and Hope Carol Rossetti has helped me understand that faith in God means to be both present and silent before God and in God’s world. In life we can be given glimpses of the eternal, but those glimpses can never be tied down. The longing doesn’t go away, but we are given hope, born out of Promise. But we are also given suffering. These are poems about God’s faithfulness to us - one day (outside time) there will be the shout; one day, the longed-for sight will be revealed. In many of her poems, she calls us to wait patiently. But, being who we are, it is not often that we do so. Christina Rossetti lets us in on her inner lifelong struggle to register something of her own devotion to God and the nature of God’s Love for her. It’s a relationship that took her personally to amazing heights, and also great lows. After her death, the next door neighbour told her brother William about the screams she heard from Christina’s house as she lay alone in those final days before her death. And that’s her humanity. Because, implicit in being a sentinel is to be honest in Love about what you see, feel and hear; and, as Christina Rossetti knew too well, we ourselves are not God, we are human beings who have been created by God. Each one of us shares in a particular and unique relationship with our God. She shows us too that God’s Promise is not an idea, but something transformative and to be watched out for again and again.

A paper published in 'Heroes of the Faith: 55 men and women whose lives have proclaimed Christ and inspired the faith of others' (TMA, 2015: 56-63). Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations' second Secretary-General (1953-1961), was a devout Christian whose faith gave him the courage to lead the UN through some dangerous years of the Cold War. Writer, teacher and bookshop manager, Carol O'Connor pays tribute to this remarkable diplomat and man of faith, who died prematurely in suspicious circumstances. “I don’t know who - or what - put the question. I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer yes to someone - or something - and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life in self-surrender had a goal. From that moment I have known what it means ‘not to look back,’ and ‘to take no thought for the morrow’.” Words of Dag Hammarskjöld written at Pentecost 1961, a few months before his tragic and untimely death. He consciously affirmed and surrendered in faith to something in the universe bigger than himself. This saying Yes illumined a Way, a path in life for him. This is a moment that resonates for many people of faith, the memory of a pivotal moment whereby it is felt that something inside oneself that has been resisting, finally is let go of, and assent is given. This assent brings meaning, clarification about one’s own goals and strivings. In March, Miroslav Volf spoke in Melbourne about human beings living in two distinct systems, that of faith and politics. These systems overlap but are nevertheless distinct. To live authentically, a human being needs to give priority to the world of faith. Volf says, “to be in creation is to be in reference to God.” This reminds me of Hammarskjöld in his work as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations (1953-1961). His biographer Roger Lipsey has put it well: “Hammarskjöld knew two unlike worlds very well. The world of politics and political leaders, deception and honesty, violence and kindness, reflection and the search for solutions. And another world: a world of inwardness and prayer, of self-scrutiny and ancient wisdom, of periodic return to a centre of stillness surrounded by silence that nourishes, situates and restores. In the first world, he was nearly always with people. In the second, nearly always alone with his own person and his God. In both worlds he was a lifelong inquirer with initiative; it wasn’t enough to pass through, contributing cautious splashes of oneself here and there. In the world at large, he strove to summon the best of himself, look carefully and imaginatively, and act as wisely as possible.” When we observe his actions as UN leader, e.g. his passionate belief in personal dialogue with world leaders at critical moments in a nation’s history, we see this took immense courage and integrity on his part. Hammarskjöld was breaking new ground for the budding organisation. Though always strictly adhering to the UN charter, he helped forge and grow the unique character of UN nations at a particularly early and vulnerable stage of its development in the cold war. Where did he get his insight from? Where did he get his courage? What sustained and nourished him? Given that we have, I think, a paucity of leaders with such depth today, I wanted to know more about him. But also, how do each of us translate our inner dialogue, our ‘negotiations with ourselves and with God’ into our everyday world? For Hammarskjöld, as for me, that God is the Christian God, the centre of which is Love. It’s the Trinitarian God of Father/Mother, Son and Spirit. How can we with more conscious awareness transcribe our inner life in God, relationship with Jesus, into our own actions in our lives? Dag Hammarskjöld was born July 29th 1905, the youngest of four sons. He grew up in a castle in Uppsala built by King Gustav Vasa in 1545, one of Sweden’s oldest and most historic castles. Below the castle stands the school he attended. And on the other side is the brick gothic Lutheran Cathedral which he attended with his family. The Castle is ten minutes by foot from the University, and not far from the university library. Hammarskjöld’s family moved in soon after his birth, and lived there for almost quarter of a century, until his father retired as Governor of Uppsala. He continued to live with his parents when they left the castle. It was only at the age of 40, five years after his mother’s death, as he was about to transfer to the Foreign Office, that he established his own home. Hammarskjöld had a privileged, and on one level cloistered childhood. The family was of the old nobility. Dag’s father (1862-1953) was a scholar in philology, law and government. He was the first delegate to the second Peace Conference at The Hague. Viewed, himself, as a non-party participant in international affairs, he was so successful that the King summoned him to form a Cabinet and he was Prime Minister through most of the First World War, managing to keep Sweden neutral. From his father, Dag inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country, or humanity. Dag came to be influenced strongly by his father’s non-partisan position in political affairs and eventually took his place, quite literally his chair, seat No. 17, in the Swedish Academy in 1954. In his speech when he took his father’s chair he spoke of him with respect and admiration. In 1917, Archbishop Nathan Söderblom moved to the Cathedral and close friendships developed between the two families. Overtime Söderblom, himself was one of the original founders of the Ecumenical Movement for Christian Unity, became a mentor for Hammarskjöld. He strove to bring a Christian perspective onto social, political and international issues. The guidance of Söderblom would have countenanced another lifelong influence, Axel Hägerström, a fierce and formidable atheist professor of philosophy who taught him at University. Where Hammarskjöld came to value the intellectual rigour, language and method Hägerström disciplined into his thinking, he came to reject Hägerström’s demolition of medieval Christian mystics and complete dismissal of spiritual experience. Still today it is unexplained how and why Hammarskjöld’s plane crashed over the Congo, as he travelled to speak with Moise Tishombe, a Congolese politician. When he died only one person, his friend Leif Belfrage, knew about his personal journal, Markings. A few years before, Hammarskjöld had asked Leif that if he died, could he please receive the book and see if it were something worth publishing. A letter to this effect was inside the journal, which was found by his bedside in his New York apartment after his death. Markings is a diary, described by its author as a book “concerning my negotiations with myself - and with God.” At the beginning, he quotes Meister Eckhart: Only the hand that erases can write the true thing. So It was a journal that was read and reworked by its writer over time. As a child, Hammarskjöld had a great interest in biology. Carl Linnaeus, originator of taxonomy and professor of botany at Uppsala mid-18th century was an inspiration. Linnaeus also had found spiritual renewal by exploring mountains in the Swedish far north. In 1957, Hammarskjöld said: ‘With the creative power of the poet (Linnaeus) showed us how better to capture and hold the elusive experience of the moment in the net of language…A great naturalist guided the author, but a great poet permitted the scholar to peer into the secret council chamber of God.’ Linnaeus had a mind that liked classifications, minute details. He had a fascination with the natural world, as well as a passion for broad ideas, open spaces. Hammarskjöld’s words Numen semper adest (The divine is breaking in around us) is a reference to Linnaeus, who had the words: Innocue vivite, numen adest (a line from Ovid’s Art of Love , ‘Live innocently, the divine is always breaking in’) placed in a prominent place in his home. Hammarskjöld read widely: Otto’s Idea of the Holy, Schweitzer, Pascal, Thomas A Kempis, Hesse, Conrad. The writings of the Christian mystics increasingly interested him. He gave a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing to David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel in 1953. He loved Saint John of the Cross. Later he was to meet with Martin Buber and on that last fateful trip was several chapters into translating I and Thou from the German and English, into Swedish. Hammarsjköld wasn’t one of the leading candidates for the UN position. The offer came out of the blue, for him and others. He was thought a good middle of the road candidate from neutral Sweden, who wasn’t a member of any political party and spoke four languages fluently. He was a quiet,reserved man with moral integrity, intelligence, knowledge and experience in foreign affairs who, it was thought, would toe the line. They didn’t know what they were in for. And in truth, it looks like Hammarskjöld didn’t know either. In 1956 Hammarskjöld wrote in Markings: The road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action. Hammarskjöld brought a new character, a moral force to the United Nations. His first move as Secretary-General was to tackle the presence of the FBI within the House. The era of what he called “McCarthy-ish hysteria” had led to suspicion and mistrust of many members being secret Communist sympathisers. For Hammarskjöld, the presence of the FBI could only create dysfunction and he found ways for its removal. As well as believing in the integrity of its members, Hammarskjöld espoused the independence of the United Nations as vital for its health and proper functioning. In 1954 he remarked that ‘sometimes (the Secretary-General) will have to voice the wishes of the peoples against this or that government.’ Maintaining this attitude gained him respect, but not popularity in all quarters - particularly amongst the world superpowers. Hammarskjöld believed that when you have a problem with someone, you talk face to face with that person. Translated into the international political scene, talking directly with world leaders in times of tension or high conflict took courage on his part. Initially, his approach was viewed as novel, or reckless, but later vindicated in what became known as the Peking Formula. In 1957, China took 11 US airman, and 2 CIA agents hostage. Hammarskjöld took the extraordinary measure of travelling to Beijing (Peking) to negotiate their release. He kept these negotiations confidential; discretion, particularly with the media, was vital. He worked in terms of developing a personal connection with Premier Zhou Enlai and sought commonality of interests and understanding. There was no immediate outcome, and his comments to the US press were characteristically evasive and brilliantly diplomatic. But some months later, on his 50th birthday, he was informed in a letter from Zhou that the hostages were released as a birthday gift. ‘Leave it to Dag’ became a catchphrase in the late 1950s. With similar strategic diplomacy and personal approach during the Suez Canal crisis, he persuaded Israel’s Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Egypt’s President Nasser to accept the UN peace keeping corps to work out peaceful means of differences. Hammarskjöld got results. But these results came at a cost. He was always an advocate for the smaller developing nations, much to the chagrin of the super powers. When Belgium released its imperial control over the Congo in 1960, it left the nation ill-prepared for self-government and vulnerable to exploitation by the US, Russia and France. There were many valuable minerals of interest there, not least uranium. Initially, UN ambassadors brought in peace troops and sought constructive dialogue between vying factional leaders, but they were struggling. One UN representative and his wife had to be recalled back to the US for fear of assassination by Congolese politicians. The CIA had a presence and the Soviet Union had spies. These were volatile and dangerous times. Eventually, Hammarskjöld decided to personally travel to Ndola, a Rhodesian mining city, and mediate a dialogue between two of the major Congolese leaders - Tishombe and Adoula . Although cease fires were never guaranteed on either side, he thought it looked hopeful that some sort of constructive outcome would eventuate, and that the gradual withdrawal of UN troops from the Congo would be possible (by that stage 17000 troops from 20 different countries). To this day the nature of that last fatal air crash for Hammarskjöld and his crew remain problematic. Not least the reason for deliberate tardiness of response by European heads in Rhodesia once it was evident that the plane had crashed, and the fact that the autopsy report had subsequently been destroyed. Hammarskjöld was thrown free from the crash and appears to have been alive at that point. In 2012, an independent commission, instituted by a committee from the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, found there is sufficient evidence to warrant a new US investigation into whether Hammarskjöld’s plane was shot down or had a bomb planted within before it crashed. Dag Hammarskjöld was both an idealist, and a realist. He believed that the world could be a better place, but was not naïve to the risks involved in accepting the responsibility to make it so. His aspiration was for all nations, large and small, to work together with peaceful interdependence. Hammarskjöld always worked hard and was totally dedicated to his professional responsibilities, particularly during difficult periods, e.g. as discussions became more difficult during the Congo crisis, he went to bed at 5am and was up working by 9am. For rest and relaxation he liked to translate. In June 1961, friend and artist, Bo Beskow, reports these words from Hammarskj: "If I have one unsolvable problem to think of night and day, I can manage. And even if I have two or three at the same time - but when they start multiplying my brain starts to boil. I simply have to find something to translate. But what?" That what, became Buber’s I and Thou. That Hammarkjöld found translation a means of relaxation tells us something about him. It was calming to translate words from one language to another, to move across languages, ideas, worlds, ideas. He enjoyed seeing connections, bringing together that which is in disparate places. It is as if he was hard-wired to seek out the impartial position. It is the fitting place of someone who is most comfortable working with the bigger picture as well as the fine details and who is working for world peace. Markings, or Vagmarken in Swedish, has a certain meaning. They are trail marks, cairns - the piles of stones a climber leaves to mark his progress on an uncharted mountain. These piles of rocks aid the climber in his descent, so he should know his way and not lose direction. These words we encounter in Hammarskjold’s journal are the word shapes of a man who wanted to signify certain points in his life. Why? He often felt he was pushing limits at the frontier of the unheard of, in Swedish vid gransen or det oerhorda - oerhorda, meaning, the unheard of, or, the ineffable, unfathomable, inapprehensible, hidden, latent, numinous. The first thing explorers want to do when they enter an unknown landscape is to chart their course; map out the territory they are going through so they can find their way back. And also show others what they have discovered. Markings is the record of a pathway through Hammarskjöld’s own life. It reveals a man who finds himself a little like Job, struggling and working through suffering out there in the wilderness of the white northern mountains with his God. Like Job, it’s the testament of a man who is attempting to live authentically in the times that he finds himself in, the spiritual struggles inside of himself. Hammarskjöld constantly opens himself to self-scrutiny and cross-examination. Just as Markings kept his inner journey on track, he used the UN Charter to keep his role as Secretary General of the UN in check. During difficult times of conflict within the House, he always referred back to it as the place where he gleaned discernment and justification for his decisions. He drew strength from the charter in his work for impartiality amongst all nations, particularly the smaller ones under threat by the super powers. We see this particularly in the later years with the aggressive, eroding stance taken by the Soviets. Just as he let go in a spiritual sense, in Markings, to his Christian God, with the UN he would let go in terms of requesting the House as a whole to vote on contentious issues. In both the private and public sphere he sought to walk a path that was being revealed to him, but also in some sense he was surrendering to. He was both in control, and surrendering that control. So both Markings and the UN Charter gave him signposts. Each was a compass, representing something to which he held himself accountable. I conclude with his own concluding words at Pentecost 1961: “Lead by the Ariadne’s thread of my answer through the labyrinth of life, I came to a time and place where I realised that the way leads to a triumph, that the price for committing one’s life would be reproach, and that the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation (or humility). After that, the word ‘courage’ lost its meaning, since nothing could be taken from me. “As I continued along the way, I learned, step by step, word by word, that behind every saying of the hero of the Gospels stands one man and one man’s experience. Also behind the prayer that the cup might pass from him and his promise to drink it. Also behind each of the words from the Cross.” Full paper and quotes can be found on the Carmelite Library Blog.